[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Bringing down the new Berlin Walls

[Bill Totten]

The last thing the west wants is to dismantle the barriers separating
"us" from "them". They are vital for justifying invasion, plunder and
nuclear proliferation.

by John Pilger

New Statesman (February 14 2008)


The recent breakout of the people of Gaza provided a heroic spectacle
unlike any other since the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the smashing down
of the Berlin Wall. Whereas on the occupied West Bank, Ariel Sharon's
master plan of walling in the population and stealing their land and
resources has all but succeeded, requiring only a Palestinian Vichy to
sign it off, the people of Gaza have defied their tormentors, however
briefly, and it is a guarantee they will do so again. There is profound
symbolism in their achievement, touching lives and hopes all over the world.

"[Sharon's] fate for us", wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian, "was a
Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless,
destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious
ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious
tribalism, and co-opted [by] collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of
today - that is what he had in store for us and he nearly achieved it."

Israel's and America's experiments in mass suffering nearly achieved it.
There was First Rains, the code name for a terror of sonic booms that
came every night and sent Gazan children mad. There was Summer Rains,
which showered bombs and missiles on civilians, then extrajudicial
executions, and finally a land invasion. Ehud Barak, the current Israeli
defence minister, has tried every kind of blockade: the denial of
electricity for water and sewage pumps, incubators and dialysis machines
and the denial of fuel and food to a population of mostly malnourished
children. This has been accompanied by the droning, insincere, incessant
voices of western broadcasters and politicians, one merging with the
other, platitude upon platitude, tribunes of the "international
community" whose response is not to help, but to excuse an indisputably
illegal occupation as "disputed" and damn a democratically elected
Palestinian Authority as "Hamas militants" who "refuse to recognise
Israel's right to exist" when it is Israel that demonstrably refuses to
recognise the Palestinians' right to exist.

"What is being hidden from the [Israeli] public", wrote Uri Avnery, a
founder of Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace movement, on 26 January, "is
that the launching of the Qassams [rockets from Gaza] could be stopped
tomorrow. Several months ago, Hamas proposed a ceasefire. It repeated
the offer this week . . . Why doesn't our government jump at this
proposal? Simple: to make such a deal, we must speak to Hamas . . . It
is more important to boycott Hamas than to put an end to the suffering
of Sderot. All the media co-operate with this pretence." Hamas long ago
offered Israel a ten-year ceasefire and has since recognised the
"reality" of the Jewish state. This is almost never reported in the west.

The inspiration of the Palestinian breakout from Gaza was dramatically
demonstrated by the star Egyptian midfielder Mohamed Abou treika.
Helping his national side to a 3-0 victory over Sudan in the African
Nations Cup, he raised his shirt to reveal a T-shirt with the words
"Sympathise with Gaza" in English and Arabic. The crowd stood and
cheered, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world expressed
their support for him and for Gaza. An Egyptian journalist who joined a
delegation of sports writers to Fifa to protest against Aboutreika's
yellow card said: "It is actions like his that bring many walls down,
walls of silence, walls in our minds".

In the murdochracies, where most of the world is viewed as useful or
expendable, we have little sense of this. The news selection is
unremittingly distracting and disabling. The cynicism of an identical
group of opportunists laying claim to the White House is given
respectability as each of them competes to support the Bush regime's
despotic war-making. John McCain, almost certainly the Republican
nominee for president, wants a "hundred-year war". That the leading
Democratic candidates are a woman and a black man is of supreme
irrelevance; the fanatical Condoleezza Rice is both female and black.
Look into the murky world behind Hillary Clinton and you find the likes
of Monsanto, a company that produced Agent Orange, the war chemical that
continues to destroy Vietnam. One of Barack Obama's chief whisperers is
Zbigniew Brzezinski, architect of Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan,
which spawned jihadism, al-Qaeda and 9/11.

This malign circus has been silent on Palestine and Gaza and almost
anything that matters, including the following announcement, perhaps the
most important of the century: "The first use of nuclear weapons must
remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent
the use of weapons of mass destruction". Inviting incredulity, these
words may require more than one reading. They come from a statement
written by five of the west's top military leaders, an American, a
Briton, a German, a Frenchman and a Dutchman, who help run the club
known as Nato. They are saying the west should nuke countries that have
weapons of mass destruction - with the exclusion, that is, of the west's
nuclear arsenal. Nuking will be necessary because "the west's values and
way of life are under threat".

Where is this threat coming from? "Over there", say the generals.

Where? In "the brutal world".

An identifiable target

On 21 January, a day prior to the Nato announcement, Gordon Brown also
out-Orwelled Orwell. He said that "the race for more and bigger
stockpiles of nuclear destruction [sic]" is over. The reason he gave was
that "the international community" (basically, the west) was facing
"serious challenges". One of these challenges is Iran, which has no
nuclear weapons and no programme to build them, according to America's
National Intelligence Estimates. This is in striking contrast to Brown's
Britain, which, in defiance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has
commissioned an entirely new Trident nuclear arsenal at a cost believed
to be as much as GBP 25 billion. What Brown was doing was threatening
Iran on behalf of the Bush regime, which wants to attack Iran before the
end of the presidential year.

Jonathan Schell, author of the seminal Fate of the Earth (1982),
provides compelling evidence in his recently published The Seventh
Decade: the New Shape of Nuclear Danger (2007) that nuclear war has now
moved to the centre of western foreign policy even though the enemy is
invented. In response, Russia has begun to restore its vast nuclear
arsenal. Robert McNamara, the US defence secretary during the Cuban
crisis, describes this as "Apocalypse Soon". Thus, the wall dismantled
by young Germans in 1989 and sold to tourists is being built in the
minds of a new generation.

For the Bush and Blair regimes, the invasion of Iraq and the campaigns
against Hamas, Iran and Syria are vital in fabricating this new "nuclear
threat". The effect of the Iraq invasion, says a study cited by Noam
Chomsky, is a "sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist
attacks".

Behold Nato's instant "brutal world".

Of course, the highest and oldest wall is that which separates "us" from
"them". This is described today as a great divide of religions or "a
clash of civilisations", which are false concepts, propagated in western
scholarship and journalism to provide what Edward Said called "the
other" - an identifiable target for fear and hatred that justifies
invasion and economic plunder. In fact, the foundations for this wall
were laid more than 500 years ago when the privileges of "discovery and
conquest" were granted to Christopher Columbus in a world that the then
all-powerful pope considered his property, to be disposed of according
to his will.

Nothing has changed. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund,
the World Trade Organisation and now Nato are invested with the same
privileges of conquest on behalf of the new papacy in Washington. The
goal is what Bill Clinton called the "integration of countries into the
global free-market community", the terms of which, noted the New York
Times, "require the United States to get involved in the plumbing and
wiring of other nations' internal affairs more deeply than ever before."

This modern system of dominance requires sophisticated propaganda that
presents its aims as benign, even "promoting democracy in Iraq",
according to BBC executives responsible for responding to sceptical
members of the public. That "we" in the west have the unfettered right
to exploit the economies and resources of the poor world while
maintaining tariff walls and state subsidies is taught as serious
scholarship in the economics departments of leading universities. This
is neoliberalism - socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.
"Rather than acknowledging", wrote Chalmers Johnson, "that free trade,
privatisation and the rest of their policies are ahistorical,
self-serving economic nonsense, apologists for neoliberalism have also
revived an old 19th-century and neo-Nazi explanation for developmental
failure - namely, culture".

What is rarely discussed is that liberalism as an open-ended, violent
ideology is destroying liberalism as a reality. Hatred of Muslims is
widely advertised by those claiming the respectability of what they call
"the left". At the same time, opponents of the new papacy are routinely
smeared, as seen in the recent fake charges of narcoterrorism against
Hugo Chavez. Having insinuated their way into public debate, the smears
deflect authentic critiques of Chavez's Venezuela and prepare the ground
for an assault on it.

This is the role that journalism has played in the invasion of Iraq and
the great injustice in Palestine. It also represents a wall, on which
Aldous Huxley, describing his totalitarian utopia in Brave New World
(1932), might have written: "Opposition is apostasy. Fatalism is ideal.
Silence is preferred." If the people of Gaza can disobey all three, why
can't we?

www.johnpilger.com

http://www.newstatesman.com/200802140027

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