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Arriving in a village in southern
Vietnam, I caught sight of two children who bore witness to the longest war of
the 20th century. Their terrible deformities were familiar. All along the
Mekong river, where the forests were petrified and silent, small human
mutations lived as best they could.
Today, at the Tu Du paediatrics
hospital in Saigon, a former operating theatre is known as the "collection
room" and, unofficially, as the "room of horrors". It has
shelves of large bottles containing grotesque foetuses. During its invasion of
Vietnam, the United States sprayed a defoliant herbicide on vegetation and
villages to deny "cover to the enemy". This was Agent Orange, which
contained dioxin, poisons of such power that they cause foetal death,
miscarriage, chromosomal damage and cancer.
In 1970, a US Senate report revealed
that "the US has dumped [on South Vietnam] a quantity of toxic chemical amounting
to six pounds per head of population, including woman and children". The
code-name for this weapon of mass destruction, Operation Hades, was changed to
the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand. Today, an estimated 4.8 million
victims of Agent Orange are children.
Len Aldis, secretary of the
Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society, recently returned from Vietnam with a
letter for the International Olympic Committee from the Vietnam Women's Union.
The union's president, Nguyen Thi Thanh Hoa, described "the severe
congenital deformities [caused by Agent Orange] from generation to
generation". She asked the IOC to reconsider its decision to accept
sponsorship of the London Olympics from the Dow Chemical Corporation, which was
one of the companies that manufactured the poison and has refused to compensate
its victims.
Aldis hand-delivered the letter to
the office of Lord Coe, chairman of the London Organising Committee. He has had
no reply. When Amnesty International pointed out that in 2001 Dow Chemical
acquired "the company responsible for the Bhopal gas leak [in India in
1984] which killed 7,000 to 10,000 people immediately and 15,000 in the
following twenty years", David Cameron described Dow as a "reputable
company". Cheers, then, as the TV cameras pan across the £7 million
decorative wrap that sheathes the Olympic stadium: the product of a 10-year
"deal" between the IOC and such a reputable destroyer.
History is buried with the dead and
deformed of Vietnam and Bhopal. And history is the new enemy. On 28 May,
President Obama launched a campaign to falsify the history of the war in
Vietnam. To Obama, there was no Agent Orange, no free fire zones, no turkey
shoots, no cover-ups of massacres, no rampant racism, no suicides (as many
Americans took their own lives as died in the war), no defeat by a resistance
army drawn from an impoverished society. It was, said Mr. Hopey Changey,
"one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the
annals of [US] military history".
The following day, the New York
Times published a long article documenting how Obama personally selects the
victims of his drone attacks across the world. He does this on "terror
Tuesdays" when he browses through mug shots on a "kill list",
some of them teenagers, including "a girl who looked even younger than her
17 years". Many are unknown or simply of military age. Guided by
"pilots" sitting in front of computer screens in Las Vegas, the
drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of lungs and blow people to
bits. Last September, Obama killed a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, purely on the
basis of hearsay that he was inciting terrorism. "This one is easy,"
he is quoted by aides as saying as he signed the man's death warrant. On 6
June, a drone killed 18 people in a village in Afghanistan, including women,
children and the elderly who were celebrating a wedding.
The New York Times article was not a
leak or an expose. It was a piece of PR designed by the Obama administration to
show what a tough guy the 'commander-in-chief' can be in an election year. If
re-elected, Brand Obama will continue serving the wealthy, pursuing
truth-tellers, threatening countries, spreading computer viruses and murdering
people every Tuesday.
The threats against Syria,
co-ordinated in Washington and London, scale new peaks of hypocrisy. Contrary
to the raw propaganda presented as news, the investigative journalism of the
German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung identifies those responsible for
the massacre in Houla as the 'rebels' backed by Obama and Cameron. The paper's
sources include the rebels themselves. This has not been completely ignored in
Britain. Writing in his personal blog, ever so quietly, Jon Williams, the BBC
world news editor, effectively dishes his own 'coverage', citing western officials
who describe the 'psy-ops' operation against Syria as 'brilliant'. As brilliant
as the destruction of Libya, and Iraq, and Afghanistan.
And as brilliant as the psy-ops of
the Guardian's latest promotion of Alastair Campbell, the chief collaborator of
Tony Blair in the criminal invasion of Iraq. In his "diaries",
Campbell tries to splash Iraqi blood on the demon Murdoch. There is plenty to
drench them all. But recognition that the respectable, liberal, Blair-fawning
media was a vital accessory to such an epic crime is omitted and remains a
singular test of intellectual and moral honesty in Britain.
How much longer must we subject
ourselves to such an "invisible government"? This term for
insidious propaganda, first used by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud
and inventor of modern public relations, has never been more apt.
"False reality" requires historical amnesia, lying by omission and
the transfer of significance to the insignificant. In this way, political
systems promising security and social justice have been replaced by piracy,
"austerity" and "perpetual war": an extremism dedicated to
the overthrow of democracy. Applied to an individual, this would identify a
psychopath. Why do we accept it?
21
June 2012
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