John
Pilger talks to the media after meeting with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy, where he has been seeking asylum
for over two years.
John
Pilger 07 December 2014.
The world
faces the prospect of major war, but the truth is turned upside down and inside
out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the Iraq
bloodbath.
WHY HAS SO
MUCH journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion
standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why
do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?
Why are
young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the
high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught
that the essence of so much of what's called the mainstream media is not
information, but power?
These are
urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps
nuclear war - with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke
Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside
out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the
bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.
The times
we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that
propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an "invisible
government". It is the government. It rules directly without fear of
contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the
world, our ability to separate truth from lies.
The
information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media;
demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media - a surreal
assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.
This power
to create a new "reality" has been building for a long time.
Forty-five years ago, a book entitled The Greening of America caused a
sensation. On the cover were these words: "There is a revolution coming.
It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the
individual."
I was a
correspondent in the United States at the time and recall the overnight
elevation to guru status of the author, a young Yale academic, Charles Reich.
His message was that truth-telling and political action had failed and only
"culture" and introspection could change the world.
Within a
few years, driven by the forces of profit, the cult of "me-ism" had
all but overwhelmed our sense of acting together, our sense of social justice
and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was
the political, and the media was the message.
In the
wake of the cold war, the fabrication of new "threats" completed the
political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a
vehement opposition.
In 2003, I
filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the distinguished
American investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few
months earlier. I asked him, "What if the freest media in the world had
seriously challenged George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their
claims, instead of channeling what turned out to be crude propaganda?"
He replied
that if we journalists had done our job "there is a very, very good chance
we would have not gone to war in Iraq."
That's a
shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put
the same question. Dan Rather, formerly of CBS, gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer and senior
journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous, gave me
the same answer.
In other
words, had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the
propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and
children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes;
the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous
Islamic State might not now exist.
Even now,
despite the millions who took to the streets in protest, most of the public in
western countries have little idea of the sheer scale of the crime committed by
our governments in Iraq. Even fewer are aware that, in the 12 years before the
invasion, the US and British governments set in motion a holocaust by denying
the civilian population of Iraq a means to live.
Those are
the words of the senior British official responsible for sanctions on Iraq in
the 1990s - a medieval siege that caused the deaths of half a million children
under the age of five, reported Unicef. The official's name is Carne Ross. In
the Foreign Office in London, he was known as "Mr. Iraq". Today, he
is a truth-teller of how governments deceive and how journalists willingly
spread the deception. "We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised
intelligence," he told me, "or we'd freeze them out."
The main
whistleblower during this terrible, silent period was Denis Halliday. Then
Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and the senior UN official in
Iraq, Halliday resigned rather than implement policies he described as
genocidal. He estimates that sanctions
killed more than a million Iraqis.
What then
happened to Halliday was instructive. He was airbrushed. Or he was vilified. On
the BBC's Newsnight programme, the presenter Jeremy Paxman shouted at him:
"Aren't you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?" The Guardian
recently described this as one of Paxman's "memorable moments". Last
week, Paxman signed a £1 million book deal.
The
handmaidens of suppression have done their job well. Consider the effects. In
2013, a ComRes poll found that a majority of the British public believed the
casualty toll in Iraq was less than 10,000 - a tiny fraction of the truth. A
trail of blood that goes from Iraq to London has been scrubbed almost clean.
Rupert
Murdoch is said to be the godfather of the media mob, and no one should doubt
the augmented power of his newspapers - all 127 of them, with a combined
circulation of 40 million, and his Fox network. But the influence of Murdoch's
empire is no greater than its reflection of the wider media.
The most
effective propaganda is found not in the Sun or on Fox News - but beneath a
liberal halo. When the New York Times published claims that Saddam Hussein had
weapons of mass destruction, its fake evidence was believed, because it wasn't
Fox News; it was the New York Times.
The same
is true of the Washington Post and the Guardian, both of which have played a
critical role in conditioning their readers to accept a new and dangerous cold
war. All three liberal newspapers have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a
malign act by Russia - when, in fact, the fascist led coup in Ukraine was the
work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.
This
inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington's military encirclement
and intimidation of Russia is not contentious. It's not even news, but
suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during
the first cold war.
Once
again, the evil empire is coming to get us, led by another Stalin or,
perversely, a new Hitler. Name your demon and let rip.
The
suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news
blackouts I can remember. The biggest Western military build-up in the Caucasus
and eastern Europe since world war two is blacked out. Washington's secret aid
to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population
of eastern Ukraine is blacked out. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that
Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner is blacked
out.
And again,
supposedly liberal media are the censors. Citing no facts, no evidence, one
journalist identified a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine as the man who shot down
the airliner. This man, he wrote, was known as The Demon. He was a scary man
who frightened the journalist. That was the evidence.
Many in
the western media haves worked hard to present the ethnic Russian population of
Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a
federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a
foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.
What the
Russian president has to say is of no consequence; he is a pantomime villain
who can be abused with impunity. An American general who heads Nato and is
straight out of Dr. Strangelove - one General Breedlove - routinely claims
Russian invasions without a shred of visual evidence. His impersonation of
Stanley Kubrick's General Jack D. Ripper is pitch perfect.
Forty
thousand Ruskies were massing on the border, according to Breedlove. That was
good enough for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Observer - the
latter having previously distinguished itself with lies and fabrications that
backed Blair's invasion of Iraq, as its former reporter, David Rose, revealed.
There is
almost the joi d'esprit of a class reunion. The drum-beaters of the Washington
Post are the very same editorial writers who declared the existence of Saddam's
weapons of mass destruction to be "hard facts".
"If
you wonder," wrote Robert Parry, "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 that has enveloped virtually the entire US
political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats
versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason."
Parry, the
journalist who revealed Iran-Contra, is one of the few who investigate the
central role of the media in this "game of chicken", as the Russian
foreign minister called it. But is it a game? As I write this, the US Congress
votes on Resolution 758 which, in a nutshell, says: "Let's get ready for
war with Russia."
In the
19th century, the writer Alexander Herzen described secular liberalism as
"the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of
this". Today, this divine right is far more violent and dangerous than
anything the Muslim world throws up, though perhaps its greatest triumph is the
illusion of free and open information.
In the
news, whole countries are made to disappear. Saudi Arabia, the source of
extremism and western-backed terror, is
not a story, except when it drives down the price of oil. Yemen has endured
twelve years of American drone attacks. Who knows? Who cares?
In 2009,
the University of the West of England published the results of a ten-year study
of the BBC's coverage of Venezuela. Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned
any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez. The
greatest literacy programme in human history received barely a passing
reference.
In Europe
and the United States, millions of readers and viewers know next to nothing about
the remarkable, life-giving changes implemented in Latin America, many of them
inspired by Chavez. Like the BBC, the reports of the New York Times, the
Washington Post, the Guardian and the rest of the respectable western media
were notoriously in bad faith. Chavez was mocked even on his deathbed. How is
this explained, I wonder, in schools of journalism?
Why are
millions of people in Britain are persuaded that a collective punishment called
"austerity" is necessary?
Following
the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the
banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed.
But within
a few months - apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate
"bonuses" - the message changed. The mugshots of guilty bankers
vanished from the tabloids and something called "austerity" became
the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as
brazen?
Today,
many of the premises of civilised life in Britain are being dismantled in order
to pay back a fraudulent debt - the debt of crooks. The "austerity"
cuts are said to be £83 billion. That's almost exactly the amount of tax
avoided by the same banks and by corporations like Amazon and Murdoch's News
UK. Moreover, the crooked banks are given an annual subsidy of £100bn in free
insurance and guarantees - a figure that would fund the entire National Health
Service.
The
economic crisis is pure propaganda. Extreme policies now rule Britain, the
United States, much of Europe, Canada and Australia. Who is standing up for the
majority? Who is telling their story? Who's keeping record straight? Isn't that
what journalists are meant to do?
In 1977,
Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, revealed that more than 400 journalists and
news executives worked for the CIA. They included journalists from the New York
Times, Time and the TV networks. In 1991, Richard Norton Taylor of the Guardian
revealed something similar in this country.
None of
this is necessary today. I doubt that anyone paid the Washington Post and many
other media outlets to accuse Edward Snowden of aiding terrorism. I doubt that
anyone pays those who routinely smear
Julian Assange - though other rewards can be plentiful.
It's clear
to me that the main reason Assange has attracted such venom, spite and
jealously is that WikiLeaks tore down the facade of a corrupt political elite
held aloft by journalists. In heralding an extraordinary era of disclosure,
Assange made enemies by illuminating and shaming the media's gatekeepers, not
least on the newspaper that published and appropriated his great scoop. He
became not only a target, but a golden goose.
Lucrative
book and Hollywood movie deals were struck and media careers launched or
kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and its founder. People have made big
money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive.
None of
this was mentioned in Stockholm on 1 December when the editor of the Guardian,
Alan Rusbridger, shared with Edward Snowden the Right Livelihood Award, known
as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize. What was shocking about this event was
that Assange and WikiLeaks were airbrushed. They didn't exist. They were
unpeople. No one spoke up for the man who pioneered digital whistleblowing and
handed the Guardian one of the greatest scoops in history. Moreover, it was
Assange and his WikiLeaks team who effectively - and brilliantly - rescued
Edward Snowden in Hong Kong and sped him to safety. Not a word.
What made
this censorship by omission so ironic and poignant and disgraceful was that the
ceremony was held in the Swedish parliament - whose craven silence on the
Assange case has colluded with a grotesque miscarriage of justice in Stockholm.
"When
the truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko,
"the silence is a lie."
It's this
kind of silence we journalists need to break. We need to look in the mirror. We
need to call to account an unaccountable media that services power and a
psychosis that threatens world war.
In the
18th century, Edmund Burke described the role of the press as a Fourth Estate
checking the powerful. Was that ever true? It certainly doesn't wash any more.
What we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and
counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power. We
need what the Russians called perestroika - an insurrection of subjugated
knowledge. I would call it real journalism.
It's 100
years since the First World War. Reporters then were rewarded and knighted for
their silence and collusion. At the height of the slaughter, British prime
minister David Lloyd George confided in C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester
Guardian: "If people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped
tomorrow, but of course they don't know and can't know."
It's time
they knew.
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