What They Don't Want You To Know - John Pilger

[45th Med]

John Pilger

01/08/04: (The New Statesman)

The disaster in Iraq is rotting the Blairite establishment. Blair himself appears ever more removed from reality; his latest tomfoolery about the "discovery" of "a huge system of clandestine weapons laboratories", which even the American viceroy in Baghdad mocked, would be astonishing, were it not merely another of his vapid attempts to justify his crime against humanity. (His crime, and George Bush's, is clearly defined as "supreme" in the Nuremberg judgment.)

What they don't want you to know

[madfloridian]

1. This poll made me furious. From your article

"A favourite source for this is a Guardian/ICM poll published on 18 November, the day Bush arrived in London, which was reported beneath the front-page headline "Protests begin but majority backs Bush visit as support for war surges". Out of 1,002 people contacted, just 426 said they welcomed Bush's visit, while the majority said they were opposed to it or did not know. As for support for the war "surging", the absurdly small number questioned still produced a majority that opposed the invasion."

[45th Med]

2. Spin.

They can't provide real polling numbers or they would be hopelessly outnumbered.

[T_i_B]

3. At the time that poll came out

DUers suspected it of being a work of pure spin designed by "new" labour to appease Bush on his UK visit.

The unspoken truth is that Blair, too, is a menace. "There never has been a time," said Blair in his address to the US Congress last year, "when the power of America was so necessary or so misunderstood or when, except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day." His fatuous dismissal of history was his way of warning us off the study of imperialism. He wants us to forget and to fail to recognise historically the "national security state" that he and Bush are erecting as a "necessary" alternative to democracy. The father of fascism, Benito Mussolini, understood this. "Modern fascism," he said, "should be properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state, military and corporate power."

[NJCher]

4. the horror

This sums it all up. He brings up the concept of "the normalisers:"

In "The Banality of Evil", Edward S Herman wrote, "Doing terrible things in an organised and systematic way rests on 'normalisation'... There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals... others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive Napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public."


We see this every day in our news. Even the fact that our own American soldier deaths are now on page eight or nine reveals that "the normalisers" are at work.

Another important connection this piece makes is between the 10,000 Americans evacuated and depleted uranium. I have always thought that number high in relationship to the number dead. This may explain that.

And last, he makes another point I had never considered--that the mass graves in Iraq were from the uprising from the first Gulf War.

What a horror.


Cher

p.s. I had to copy this article into another program to read it. Why on earth do they try to cram all this in mouse type into one small page. It's not as if it's paper!

[reprehensor]

5. What an article!

Good find! Have you seen this video? 'Breaking the Silence: Truth and lies in the war on terror' by Pilger? It's out there on the internet, seek it out and watch it. It is great.

[reprehensor]

6. Breaking the Silence.

Right here, while the link lives...

http://100777.com/node/view/567

[lebkuchen]

8. I got an e-mail today asking if I knew about the documentary

After a search here, I found your link. I'll be sending it to everyone I know. It's devastating, to see Bush and Blair's speeches of "freedom, liberty, hearts, flowers and rainbows" juxtaposed over firsthand comments from Afghan women who have been raped or who have witnessed disappearances on behalf of the warlords that Bush has put into power.

And there is no money to rebuild the country, making it more understandable why the Iraqis are so upset with the progress made to rebuild their own infrastructure: it's not going to happen.

[dudeness]

7. pilger..a great australian

:)