John Pilger on the media's war on truth (2003)
The White House sets the tone and the media echo a line that celebrates the victimhood of the invader and the evil of the Iraqis. And then London takes its cue.
We're above nations. We control the control
I'll eat you all in the end.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, on America
In Baghdad, the rise and folly of rapacious imperial power is commemorated in a forgotten cemetery called the North Gate. Dogs are its visitors; the rusted gates are padlocked, and skeins of traffic fumes hang over its parade of crumbling headstones and unchanging historical truth. Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude is buried here, in a mausoleum befitting his station, if not the cholera to which he succumbed. In 1917, he declared: "Our armies do not come . . . as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators." Within three years, 10,000 had died in an uprising against the British, who gassed and bombed those they called "miscreants". It was an adventure from which British imperialism in the Middle East never recovered.
Every day now, in the United States, the all-pervasive media tell Americans that their bloodletting in Iraq is well under way, although the true scale of the attacks is almost certainly concealed. Soon, more soldiers will have been killed since the "liberation" than during the invasion. Sustaining the myth of "mission" is becoming difficult, as in Vietnam. This is not to doubt the real achievement of the invaders' propaganda, which was the suppression of the truth that most Iraqis opposed both the regime of Saddam Hussein and the Anglo-American assault on their homeland. One reason the BBC's Andrew Gilligan angered Downing Street was that he reported that, for many Iraqis, the bloody invasion and occupation were at least as bad as the fallen dictatorship.
This is unmentionable here in America. The tens of thousands of Iraqi dead and maimed do not exist. When I interviewed Douglas Feith, number three to Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, he shook his head and lectured me on the "precision" of American weapons. His message was that war had become a bloodless science in the service of America's unique divinity. It was like interviewing a priest. Only American "boys" and "girls" suffer, and at the hands of "Ba'athist remnants", a self-deluding term in the spirit of General Maude's "miscreants". The media echo this, barely gesturing at the truth of a popular resistance and publishing galleries of GI amputees, who are described with a maudlin, down-home chauvinism which celebrates the victimhood of the invader while casting the vicious imperialism that they served as benign. At the State Department, the under-secretary for international security, John Bolton, suggested to me that, for questioning the fundamentalism of American policy, I was surely a heretic, "a Communist Party member", as he put it.
As for the great human catastrophe in Iraq, the bereft hospitals, the children dying from thirst and gastroenteritis at a rate greater than before the invasion, with almost 8 per cent of infants suffering extreme malnutrition, says Unicef; as for a crisis in agriculture which, says the Food and Agriculture Organisation, is on the verge of collapse: these do not exist. Like the American-driven, medieval-type siege that destroyed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives over 12 years, there is no knowledge of this in America: therefore it did not happen. The Iraqis are, at best, unpeople; at worst, tainted, to be hunted. "For every GI killed," said a letter given prominence in the New YorkDaily News late last month, "20 Iraqis must be executed." In the past week, Task Force 20, an "elite" American unit charged with hunting evildoers, murdered at least five people as they drove down a street in Baghdad, and that was typical.
The august New York Times and Washington Post are not, of course, as crude as the News and Murdoch. However, on 23 July, both papers gave front-page prominence to the government's carefully manipulated "homecoming" of 20-year-old Private Jessica Lynch, who was injured in a traffic accident during the invasion and captured. She was cared for by Iraqi doctors, who probably saved her life and who risked their own lives in trying to return her to American forces. The official version, that she bravely fought off Iraqi attackers, is a pack of lies, like her "rescue" (from an almost deserted hospital), which was filmed with night-vision cameras by a Hollywood director. All this is known in Washington, and much of it has been reported.
This did not deter the best and worst of American journalism uniting to help stage-manage her beatific return to Elizabeth, West Virginia, with the Times reporting the Pentagon's denial of "embellishing" and that "few people seemed to care about the controversy". According to the Post, the whole affair had been "muddied by conflicting media accounts". George Orwell described this as "words falling upon the facts like soft snow, blurring their outlines and covering up all the details". Thanks to the freest press on earth, most Americans, according to a national poll, believe Iraq was behind the 11 September attacks. "We have been the victims of the biggest cover-up manoeuvre of all time," says Jane Harman, a rare voice in Congress. But that, too, is an illusion... read more:
I'll eat you all in the end.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, on America
In Baghdad, the rise and folly of rapacious imperial power is commemorated in a forgotten cemetery called the North Gate. Dogs are its visitors; the rusted gates are padlocked, and skeins of traffic fumes hang over its parade of crumbling headstones and unchanging historical truth. Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude is buried here, in a mausoleum befitting his station, if not the cholera to which he succumbed. In 1917, he declared: "Our armies do not come . . . as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators." Within three years, 10,000 had died in an uprising against the British, who gassed and bombed those they called "miscreants". It was an adventure from which British imperialism in the Middle East never recovered.
Every day now, in the United States, the all-pervasive media tell Americans that their bloodletting in Iraq is well under way, although the true scale of the attacks is almost certainly concealed. Soon, more soldiers will have been killed since the "liberation" than during the invasion. Sustaining the myth of "mission" is becoming difficult, as in Vietnam. This is not to doubt the real achievement of the invaders' propaganda, which was the suppression of the truth that most Iraqis opposed both the regime of Saddam Hussein and the Anglo-American assault on their homeland. One reason the BBC's Andrew Gilligan angered Downing Street was that he reported that, for many Iraqis, the bloody invasion and occupation were at least as bad as the fallen dictatorship.
This is unmentionable here in America. The tens of thousands of Iraqi dead and maimed do not exist. When I interviewed Douglas Feith, number three to Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, he shook his head and lectured me on the "precision" of American weapons. His message was that war had become a bloodless science in the service of America's unique divinity. It was like interviewing a priest. Only American "boys" and "girls" suffer, and at the hands of "Ba'athist remnants", a self-deluding term in the spirit of General Maude's "miscreants". The media echo this, barely gesturing at the truth of a popular resistance and publishing galleries of GI amputees, who are described with a maudlin, down-home chauvinism which celebrates the victimhood of the invader while casting the vicious imperialism that they served as benign. At the State Department, the under-secretary for international security, John Bolton, suggested to me that, for questioning the fundamentalism of American policy, I was surely a heretic, "a Communist Party member", as he put it.
As for the great human catastrophe in Iraq, the bereft hospitals, the children dying from thirst and gastroenteritis at a rate greater than before the invasion, with almost 8 per cent of infants suffering extreme malnutrition, says Unicef; as for a crisis in agriculture which, says the Food and Agriculture Organisation, is on the verge of collapse: these do not exist. Like the American-driven, medieval-type siege that destroyed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives over 12 years, there is no knowledge of this in America: therefore it did not happen. The Iraqis are, at best, unpeople; at worst, tainted, to be hunted. "For every GI killed," said a letter given prominence in the New YorkDaily News late last month, "20 Iraqis must be executed." In the past week, Task Force 20, an "elite" American unit charged with hunting evildoers, murdered at least five people as they drove down a street in Baghdad, and that was typical.
The august New York Times and Washington Post are not, of course, as crude as the News and Murdoch. However, on 23 July, both papers gave front-page prominence to the government's carefully manipulated "homecoming" of 20-year-old Private Jessica Lynch, who was injured in a traffic accident during the invasion and captured. She was cared for by Iraqi doctors, who probably saved her life and who risked their own lives in trying to return her to American forces. The official version, that she bravely fought off Iraqi attackers, is a pack of lies, like her "rescue" (from an almost deserted hospital), which was filmed with night-vision cameras by a Hollywood director. All this is known in Washington, and much of it has been reported.
This did not deter the best and worst of American journalism uniting to help stage-manage her beatific return to Elizabeth, West Virginia, with the Times reporting the Pentagon's denial of "embellishing" and that "few people seemed to care about the controversy". According to the Post, the whole affair had been "muddied by conflicting media accounts". George Orwell described this as "words falling upon the facts like soft snow, blurring their outlines and covering up all the details". Thanks to the freest press on earth, most Americans, according to a national poll, believe Iraq was behind the 11 September attacks. "We have been the victims of the biggest cover-up manoeuvre of all time," says Jane Harman, a rare voice in Congress. But that, too, is an illusion... read more:
