by John
Pilger
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 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.
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