by John Pilger, published 1/9 in The New Statesmen
The rights of ordinary people to speak out against an unjust war and
atrocities unleashed in their name are being crushed. Fascism is at the
door. Who else, asks John Pilger, will fight it?
On
Christmas Eve, I dropped in on Brian Haw, whose hunched, pacing figure
was just visible through the freezing fog. For four and a half years,
Brian has camped in Parliament Square with a graphic display of
photographs that show the terror and suffering imposed on Iraqi
children by British policies. The effectiveness of his action was
demonstrated last April when the Blair government banned any expression
of opposition within a kilometre of parliament. The high court
subsequently ruled that, because his presence preceded the ban, Brian
was an exception.
Day after day, night after night, season upon season, he remains a
beacon, illuminating the great crime of Iraq and the cowardice of the
House of Commons. As we talked, two women brought him a Christmas meal
and mulled wine. They thanked him, shook his hand and hurried on. He
had never seen them before. “That’s typical of the public,” he said. A
man in a pinstriped suit and tie emerged from the fog, carrying a small
wreath. “I intend to place this at the Cenotaph and read out the names
of the dead in Iraq,” he said to Brian, who cautioned him: “You’ll
spend the night in the cells, mate.” We watched him stride off and lay
his wreath. His head bowed, he appeared to be whispering. Thirty years
ago, I watched dissidents do something similar outside the walls of the
Kremlin.
As the night had covered him, he was lucky. On 7 December, Maya Evans,
a vegan chef aged 25, was convicted of breaching the new Serious
Organised Crime and Police Act by reading aloud at the Cenotaph the
names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. So serious was her crime
that it required 14 policemen in two vans to arrest her. She was fined
and given a criminal record for the rest of her life.
Freedom is dying.
Eighty-year-old John Catt served with the RAF in the Second World War.
Last September, he was stopped by police in Brighton for wearing an
“offensive” T-shirt which suggested that Bush and Blair be tried for
war crimes. He was arrested under the Terrorism Act and handcuffed,
with his arms held behind his back. The official record of the arrest
says the “purpose” of searching him was “terrorism” and the “grounds
for intervention” were “carrying plackard and T-shirt with anti-Blair
info” (sic).
He is awaiting trial.
Such cases compare with others that remain secret and beyond any form
of justice: those of the foreign nationals held at Belmarsh Prison who
have never been charged, let alone put on trial. They are held “on
suspicion”. Some of the “evidence” against them, whatever it is, the
government has now admitted, could have been extracted under torture at
Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They are political prisoners in all but
name. They face the prospect of being spirited out of the country and
into the arms of a regime which may torture them to death. Their
isolated families, including children, are quietly going mad.
And for what?
Between 11 September 2001 and 30 September 2005, 895 people in total
were arrested under the Terrorism Act. Only 23 have been convicted of
offences covered by the act. As for real terrorists, the identities of
two of the 7 July bombers, including the suspected mastermind, were
known to MI5, yet nothing was done. And Blair wants to give the
security services more power. Having helped to devastate Iraq, he is
now killing freedom in his own country.
Consider parallel events in the United States. Last October, an
American doctor, loved by his patients, was punished with 22 years in
prison for founding a charity, Help the Needy, which helped children in
Iraq stricken by an economic and humanitarian blockade imposed by
America and Britain. In raising money for infants dying from diarrhoea,
Dr Rafil Dhafir broke a siege which, accor-ding to Unicef, had caused
the deaths of half a million under the age of five. John Ashcroft, the
then US attorney general, called Dr Dhafir, a Muslim, a “terrorist”, a
description mocked by even the judge in a politically motivated
travesty of a trial.
The Dhafir case is not extraordinary. In the same month, three US
circuit court judges ruled in favour of the Bush regime’s “right” to
imprison an American citizen “indefinitely” without charging him with a
crime. This was the case of Jose Padilla, a petty criminal who
allegedly visited Pakistan before he was arrested at Chicago airport
three and a half years ago. He was never charged and no evidence has
ever been presented against him. Now mired in legal complexity, the
case puts George W Bush above the law and outlaws the Bill of Rights.
Indeed, on 14 November, the US Senate in effect voted to ban habeas
corpus by passing an amendment that overturned a Supreme Court ruling
allowing Guantanamo prisoners access to a federal court. Thus, the
touchstone of America’s most celebrated freedom was scrapped. Without
habeas corpus, a government can simply lock away its opponents and
implement a dictatorship.
A related, insidious tyranny is being imposed across the world. For all
his troubles in Iraq, Bush has carried out the recommendations of a
Messianic conspiracy theory called the “Project for the New American
Century”. Written by his ideological sponsors shortly before he came to
power, it foresaw his administration as a military dictatorship behind
a democratic facade: “the cavalry on the new American frontier”, guided
by a blend of paranoia and megalomania. More than 700 American bases
are now placed strategically in compliant countries, notably at
gateways to sources of fossil fuels and encircling the Middle East and
central Asia. “Pre-emptive” aggression is policy, including the use of
nuclear weapons. The chemical warfare industry has been reinvigorated.
Missile treaties have been torn up. Space has been militarised. Global
warming has been embraced. The powers of the president have never been
greater. The judicial system has been subverted, along with civil
liberties. The former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who once
prepared the daily White House briefing, told me that the authors of
the PNAC and those now occupying positions of executive power used to
be known in Washington as “the crazies”. He said: “We should now be
very worried about fascism.”
In his epic acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature on 7 December,
Harold Pinter spoke of “a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed”.
He asked why “the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the
ruthless suppression of inde- pendent thought” of Stalinist Russia were
well known in the west while US state crimes were merely “superficially
recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged”.
A silence has reigned. Across the world, the extinction and suffering
of countless human beings can be attributed to rampant American power,
“But you wouldn’t know it,” said Pinter. “It never happened. Nothing
ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It
didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”
To its credit, the Guardian published every word of
Pinter’s warning. To its shame, though unsurprising, the state
television broadcaster ignored it. All that Newsnight
flatulence about the arts, all that recycled preening for the cameras
at Booker Prize-giving events, yet the BBC could not make room for
Britain’s greatest living dramatist, so honoured, to tell the truth.
For the BBC, it simply never happened, just as the killing of half a
million children by America’s medieval siege of Iraq during the 1990s
never happened, just as the Dhafir and Padilla trials and the Senate
vote banning freedom never happened. The political prisoners of
Belmarsh barely exist; and a big, brave posse of Metropolitan police
never swept away Maya Evans as she publicly grieved for British
soldiers killed in the cause of nothing except rotten power.
Bereft of irony, but with a snigger, the newsreader Fiona Bruce
introduced, as news, a Christmas propaganda film about Bush’s dogs.
That happened. Now imagine Bruce reading the following: “Here is
delayed news, just in. From 1945 to 2005, the United States attempted
to overthrow 50 governments, many of them democracies, and to crush 30
popular movements fighting tyrannical regimes. In the process, 25
countries were bombed, causing the loss of several million lives and
the despair of millions more.” (Thanks to William Blum’s Rogue State, published by Common Courage Press.)
The icon of horror of Saddam Hussein’s rule is a 1988 film of petrified
bodies of people in the Kurdish town of Halabja, killed in a chemical
weapons attack. The attack has been referred to a great deal by Bush
and Blair and the film shown a great deal by the BBC. At the time, as I
know from personal experience, the Foreign Office tried to cover up the
crime at Halabja. The Americans tried to blame it on Iran. Today, in an
age of images, there are no images of the chemical weapons attack on
Fallujah in November 2004. This allowed the Americans to deny it until
they were caught out recently by investigators using the internet. For
the BBC, American atrocities simply do not happen.
In 1999, while filming in Washington and Iraq, I learned the true scale
of bombing in what the Americans and British then called Iraq’s “no-fly
zones”. During the 18 months to 14 January 1999, US aircraft flew
24,000 combat missions over Iraq; almost every mission was bombing or
strafing. “We’re down to the last outhouse,” a US official protested.
“There are still some things left [to bomb], but not many.” That was
seven years ago. In recent months, the air assault on Iraq has
multiplied; the effect on the ground cannot be imagined. For the BBC,
it has not happened.
The black farce extends to those pseudo-humanitarians in the media and
elsewhere, who themselves have never seen the effects of cluster bombs
and air-burst shells, yet continue to invoke the crimes of Saddam to
justify the nightmare in Iraq and to protect a quisling prime minister
who has sold out his country and made the world more dangerous.
Curiously, some of them insist on describing themselves as “liberals”
and “left of centre”, even “anti-fascists”. They want some
respectability, I suppose. This is understandable, given that the
league table of carnage by Saddam Hussein was overtaken long ago by
that of their hero in Downing Street, who will now support an attack on
Iran.
This cannot change until we, in the west, look in the mirror and
confront the true aims and narcissism of the power applied in our name,
its extremes and terrorism. The usual double standard no longer works;
there are now millions like Brian Haw, Maya Evans, John Catt and the
man in the pinstriped suit, with his wreath. Looking in the mirror
means understanding that a violent and undemocratic order is being
imposed by those whose actions are little different from the actions of
fascists. The difference used to be distance. Now they are bringing it
home.
John Pilger’s new book, Freedom Next Time, will be published in June by Bantam Press