Mark Steele: Unless Ricky Tomlinson is working for al-Qa'ida, 'national security' is an odd reason for secrecy

Ricky Tomlinson

 

Everyone knows that in the 1970s the unions ran the country. For example, every television clip of the decade, probably by law, has to include a bit that goes “it was a time when the unions wouldn’t even let the dead be buried”, so there must be millions who think that’s what unions did. They went into the manager’s office and said “give us a rise or we’ll chuck another corpse on your desk”, and some newspapers probably claim the dead bodies became so confused that they woke up, threatening major disruption on behalf of the National Union of Zombies, Undead and Allied Flesh-Eating Trades (NUZUAFET) until Margaret Thatcher destroyed them all with a shovel.
 

 

So it’s peculiar that the Government has decided to keep documents about the 1972 building workers’ strike secret for another 10 years. The strike was for increased pay, and 24 of the strikers were charged under the Conspiracy Act, with two of them jailed as a matter of “national security”. Presumably, their demands were for a 10 per cent rise, double-time for Sundays, and the handing over of state power to Colonel Gaddafi, with all plastering to be under the control of an alliance of Angolan guerrillas.
 

One piece of evidence that has emerged to back the Government’s case was a 1973 letter from the Attorney-General, who supported the jail sentences because the strikers had used “intimidation, consisting of threatening words”. What sort of threatening words can breach national security, I wonder? Maybe they were shouting “ Give us a pay rise”, which by coincidence was the Ministry of Defence password for finding the precise location of our nuclear submarines.
 

But it was bad luck for the Government that one of the jailed strikers was Ricky Tomlinson, who then became one of our best-loved actors. So the case has continued to attract attention ever since. It seems there was a conspiracy between the construction companies, the police and the Conservative government, who wanted the strikers jailed to break the unions so they concocted the charges between them. The papers which could settle this issue were due to be released this week, but the current Government has now said they can’t be seen until 2021 “due to national security”.
 

 

If this was a strange argument at the time, it’s even more baffling 40 years later. Maybe these papers contain building workers’ prose so potent we’ll all surrender power to bricklayers and agree to become their hod-carrying slaves. Perhaps Tomlinson has been secretly working for the North Koreans, and his lines in The Royle Family were coded signals to Kim Jong-Il revealing the whereabouts of every unit of the SAS. “Denise love, put the kettle on will yer” almost cost us an entire regiment.
 

Campaigners demand that the papers be released, but you can see the Government’s point. Because if al-Qa’ida were to become aware of the details of a 40-year-old building workers’ dispute, there’s no telling what havoc they might create.
 

 

Tuesday 22 January 2013

John Pilger:Welcome to the Shammies, the media awards that recognise truly unsung talent

 

There are awards for everyone. There are the Logies, the Commies, the Tonys, the Theas, the Millies ("They cried with pride") and now the Shammies.

The Shammies celebrate the finest sham media. "Competition for the 2013 Gold Shammy," said the panel of judges, "has been cutthroat." The Shammies are not for the tabloid lower orders. Rupert Murdoch has been honoured enough. Shammies distinguish respectable journalism that guards the limits of what the best and brightest like to call the "national conversation".

The Shammy judges were especially impressed by a spirited campaign to rehabilitate Tony Blair. The winner will receive the coveted Jeremy Paxman Hoodwink Prize, in honour of the famous BBC broadcaster who says he was "hoodwinked" over Iraq - regardless of the multiple opportunities he had to challenge Blair and expose the truth and carnage of the illegal invasion.

Short-listed for Hoodwink is Michael White, the Guardian's political editor, whose lament for Blair's "wasted talent" is distinguished by his defence of Blair as the victim of a "very unholy alliance between a familiar chorus of America-bashers and Blair bait[ers]". (I am included).

On 19 December, another contender, White's colleague, Jane Martinson, was granted a "rare" interview with Cherie Blair in her "stately private office" with its "gorgeous views over Hyde Park" and "imposing mahogany furniture". In such splendour does Mrs. Blair (she prefers her married name for its "profile") run her "foundation for women" in Africa, India and the Middle East. Her political collusion in her husband's career and support for adventures that destroyed the lives of countless women was not mentioned. A PR triumph and odds-on for a Shammy.

Also nominated: the brains behind the Guardian's front page of 8 November: "The best is yet to come", dominated by a half-page picture of the happy-huggy-droney Obama family. And who could fail to appreciate the assurance from the BBC's Mark Mardell that, in personally selecting people to murder with his drones, "the care taken by the president is significant"?

Matt Frei, formerly of the BBC now of Channel 4 News, drew commendation for his reporting of Obama as a "warrior president" and Hugo Chavez as a "chubby-faced strongman". A study by the University of the West of England found that, of the 304 BBC reports on Venezuela published in a decade, only three mentioned the Chavez government's extraordinary record in promoting human rights and reducing poverty.

In the Gold Shammy category, the judges were struck by the outstanding work of the Guardian's Decca Aitkenhead. "Everywhere we went, before my eyes people fell in love with him... no one seemed to be immune." This was her memorable encounter with Peter Mandelson in 2009. She described his "effortless allure ... the intensity of his theatre is electrifying to behold... His skin is dewey, as if fresh from a spa facial, and his grooming so flawless he looks almost hyper-real, the cuff links and tie delicately co-ordinated, with their detail inversely echoed in his socks... His whole body seems weirdly untroubled by the passage of time..."

Aitkenhead had previously "profiled" Alistair Darling, the Chancellor who presided over the worst financial collapse in memory. Greeted as "old friends" by Darling and his "gregarious" wife Maggie "who cooks and makes tea and supper while Darling lights the fire", Aitkenhead effused over "a highly effective minister... he seems almost too straightforward, even high-minded, for the low cunning of political warfare."

The judges were asked to compare and contrast such moments of journalistic ecstasy with the same writer's profile of Julian Assange on 7 December. Assange answered her questions methodically, providing her with a lot of information about the state's abuse of technology and mass surveillance. "There is no debate that Assange knows more about this subject than almost anyone alive," she wrote. No matter. Rather than someone who had exposed more state criminality than any journalist, he was described as "someone convalescing after a breakdown": a mentally ill figure she likened to "Miss Havisham". Unlike the alluring, electrifying, twice disgraced Mandelson, and the high-minded, disastrous Chancellor, Assange had a "messianic grandiosity". No evidence was offered. The Gold Shammy was within her grasp.

Then, on Christmas Eve, the BBC News magazine published an article marking the 40th anniversary of the 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi. The bombing, wrote Rebecca Kesby,"was President Richard Nixon's attempt to hasten the end of the Vietnam war, as the growing strength of the Viet Cong caused heavy casualties among US ground troops".

In fact, Nixon promised "an honourable end to the war" four years earlier. His 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi in the north was as much concerned with peace as Hitler's bombing of Poland: a cynical, vengeful act of barbarism that changed nothing in the stalled Paris talks. Kesby cites Henry Kissinger's absurd claim that the North Vietnamese "were on their knees". Far from hastening "the end of the Vietnam war", America's savagery ensured the war went on for another two a half years, during which more Vietnamese were killed than during the previous decade.

Kesby claimed that previous US targets had been "fuel depots and munitions stores". On my wall is a photograph I took of a hamlet in the north obliterated by F-105 and Phantom fighters flying at 200 feet in order to pick off "soft targets" - human beings. In the town of Hongai, I stood in the debris of churches, hospitals, schools. A new type of "dart bomb" was used; the darts were made from a plastic that did not show in X-rays, and the victims, mostly children, suffered until they died. Filmed by Malcolm Aird and James Cameron, a news report on this type of terror bombing was suppressed by the BBC.

Today our memory of all of this is sanitised. America and its allies, using even more diabolical weapons, continue to "hasten to the end of war". Such has been the BBC's unerring theme since Vietnam. The Gold Shammy is richly deserved.

17 January 2013

John Pilger:How the chosen ones ended Australia's sporting prowess and revealed its secret past

The ferries that ply the river west of Sydney Harbour bear the names of Australia's world champion sportswomen. They include the Olympic swimming gold-medalists Dawn Fraser and Shane Gould, and runners Betty Cuthbert and Majorie Jackson. As you board, there is a photograph of the athlete in her prime, and a record of her achievements. This is vintage Australia. Often shy and never rich, sporting heroes were nourished by a society that, long before most other countries, won victories for ordinary people: the first 35-hour working week, child benefits, pensions, secret ballots and, with New Zealand, the vote for women. By the 1960s, Australians had the most equitable spread of personal income in the world. In modern-day corporate Australia, this is long forgotten. "We are the chosen ones," sang a choir promoting the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

One of the ferries is named after Evonne Goolagong, the tennis star who won Wimbledon in 1971 and 1980. She is Aboriginal, like Cathy Freeman, who won a gold medal in the 400 metres at Sydney. For all their talent, both belong to a carefully constructed facade, behind which Australia's secret indigenous history is  suppressed and denied.

The late Charlie Perkins, an Aboriginal leader who played first-division football in England, told me, "There's an ambivalence that consumes many of us. I was so pleased to be back home, seeing that wonderful light, hearing the birds, seeing my mates, but I felt the racism more than ever. For one thing, no white person ever invited me home for a meal, for anything. Blacks weren't even allowed in the grandstands, not even in the blacks-only sections." In the 1960s, Charlie led "freedom rides" into the north-west of New South Wales, where "nigger hunts" were still not uncommon. Abused and spat at, he stood at the turnstiles of local swimming pools and sports fields and demanded that a race bar be lifted. "In South Africa, at least you knew where you stood," he said. "In Australia, you can have a friend and an enemy all in one person, especially if you're like me, of mixed blood. Someone will call you his mate one minute, then before you know it, you feel an indifference, a coldness you can't explain. It's what drove my brother to kill himself."

Wally MacArthur was one of the "stolen generation". The victim of a eugenics-inspired campaign to "breed out the black", Wally was taken from his mother as a small boy and was destined to become a servant in white society.  His gift was speed. Running without shoes, he was the Usain Bolt of his day. Wally was never selected in a state or national team.

Eddie Gilbert's story is similar. A dazzling fast bowler, he was given special permission to play outside his Queensland "reserve" and took five wickets for 65 runs against the West Indies. He later faced Donald Bradman, the world's greatest batsman, and bowled him for a duck. Thereafter, the secretary of the Queensland Cricket Association wrote to the Protector of Aborigines: "The matter of Eddie Gilbert has been fully discussed by my executive committee and it was decided, with your concurrence, to return Gilbert to the settlement." The letter noted that his cricketing whites "should be laundered and returned". Eddie was committed to an asylum where he was mistreated, and died.

The great Aboriginal boxer, Ron Richards, died a prisoner on Palm Island off the Queensland coast. He had won most Australian titles, and when he became British Empire middleweight champion, the Chief Protector stepped in. "Like many other crossbreeds," he wrote, "he is unstable of character and inclined to be gullible."

On 30 July, in London, the Aboriginal light-heavyweight Damien Hooper stepped into the ring for his Olympic bout wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the Aboriginal flag: the same flag now approved to fly on public buildings in Australia. The Australian Olympic Committee demanded he make a public apology - itself a profanity in keeping with the enduring humiliation of Aboriginal people. Wearing the shirt was said to have breached the Olympic Charter; Coca Cola would have been acceptable. The sports writer for the Sydney Morning Herald sneered that it was "a stunt" by an opportunist. "I'm representing my culture, not only my country," said Hooper. "I'm proud of what I did."

In his 1995 book, Obstacle Race, Professor Colin Tatz, who has charted Australia's genocidal history, says that of the 1,200 Aboriginal sportsmen and women he studied, only six - 0.5% - had access to the same opportunities and sporting facilities as whites. I asked him what had changed. "A few things are better." he wrote, "The figure now is about one per cent."

On the day Damien Hooper was forced to apologise, Australian swimmer Nick D'Arcy failed to make the final of the 200 metres butterfly. Few in the crowd were aware that this "chosen one" was a convicted thug who smashed the face of fellow swimmer Simon Cowley in an unprovoked assault in 2008. Ordered to pay his victim A$180,000 in damages, D'Arcy declared himself bankrupt and paid not a cent, nor showed any remorse. Yet, the Australian swimming authorities duly lifted his ban and allowed him to compete in London. After all, said a Liberal MP, " Nick has paid a terrible price for his indiscretions".

Josh Booth rowed in Australia's eight that came last in the final. To a Chosen One, last is unacceptable, so Booth went on a rampage in Egham in Surrey, smashing windows. He later described it as an "emotional outburst". The Sydney Morning Herald shed a tear for "the pain of a young man who lost in an event that comes along every four years".

Unlike those original Australians forced to defend their basic human rights and apologise for their distinctiveness, both D'Arcy and Booth have enjoyed every advantage and privilege. Their "indiscretions" and victimhood are accompanied by a sense of entitlement that has shredded the national myth of "fair go", not to mention an Olympic prowess of which we all were once proud.

9 August 2012

Mark Steel: I love the Olympics – but not here

"A global festival is taking place in our city and we're told to stay at home."

What an ideal opportunity that was, to at last engage the local residents with the Olympics. When it turned out there weren't enough security staff, they should have employed east London's famous criminal community. They'd have loved the chance to stand over people at the entrance gates, growling "Now listen. I said LISTEN. Any misbehaving, and you're going to make me upset. And you don't wanna see me, not when I'm upset. So don't even THINK abaht taking in non-sponsored foodstuffs or you'll be sucking all your dinners through a straw. ALL RIGHT? Now go and enjoy yer mixed doubles quarter-finals in yer badminton."

This would be more pleasant than armed soldiers patrolling the event, and other security measures such as placing surface-to-air missiles on council estate roofs. If the Palestinians do that they get screamed at for using civilians as a "human shield", but we're doing it to protect the 200 metres backstroke.

There's now a bigger military presence in London than at any time since the Blitz. By the time the Games start, there'll be a sniper on the diving board and swimmers in lane five of the pool will have to go round the periscope of a nuclear sub.

It's been suggested that spectators should allow three hours to get into the site, which fits with the sense most Londoners have that we're not wanted there. Even the route of the marathon has been changed to avoid images that might suggest that London has grubby bits.

A global festival is taking place in our city and we're told every day to stay at home, work at home, and not even use the word Olympic unless we're an official sponsor. By next week, London will have become like the queue for a prestigious nightclub, with bouncers patrolling the streets telling anyone who isn't good-looking or famous to go home, so we don't damage London's global brand image by revealing our unsightly people.

It ought to be fantastic, but many sports fans say they've never looked forward to an Olympic Games with less enthusiasm than the one in their own town. Maybe that's because when it's nearby you can see the greed and sinister snobbery close up. So people are cynical about the Olympics not because they hate sport but because they love it, just as the more you love music, the more you'll dislike One Direction and Justin Bieber.

So I wonder if it's too late to have a fantastic Olympics, by handing them over to France or Argentina, and as part of the deal they can have Sebastian sodding Coe for nothing as well.

July 18 2012 The Independent

John Pilger:Blair, Olympic deals and the glimpse of a another Britain

This is a story of two letters and two Britains. The first letter was written by Sebastian Coe, the former athlete who chairs the London Olympics Organising Committee. He is now called Lord Coe. In the New Statesman of 21 June, I reported an urgent appeal to Coe by the Vietnam Women's Union that he and his IOC colleagues reconsider their decision to accept sponsorship from Dow Chemical, one of the companies that manufactured dioxin, a poison used against the population of Vietnam.

Code-named Agent Orange, this weapon of mass destruction was "dumped" on Vietnam, according to a US Senate report in 1970, in what was called Operation Hades. The letter to Coe estimates that today 4.8 million victims of Agent Orange are children, all of them shockingly deformed.

In his reply, Coe describes Agent Orange as "a highly emotional issue" whose development and use "was made by the US government [which] has rightly led the process of addressing the many issues that have resulted". He refers to a "constructive dialogue" between the US and Vietnamese governments "to resolve issues". They are "best placed to manage the reconciliation of these two countries." When I read this, I was reminded of the weasel letters that are a specialty of the Foreign Office in London in denying the evidence of crimes of state and corporate power, such as the lucrative export of terrible weapons. The former Iraq Desk Officer, Mark Higson, called this sophistry "a culture of lying".

I sent Coe's letter to a number of authorities on Agent Orange. The reactions were unerring. "There has been no initiative at all by the US government to address the health and economic effects on the people of Vietnam affected by dioxin," wrote the respected US attorney Constantine Kokkoris, who led an action against Dow Chemical. He noted that "manufacturers like Dow were aware of the presence and harmfulness of dioxin in their product but failed to inform the government in an effort to avoid regulation." According to the War legacies League, none of the health, environmental and economic problems caused by the world's most enduring chemical warfare has been addressed by the US. Non-government agencies have helped "only a small number of those in need". A "clean up" in a "dioxin hot spot" in the city of Da Nang, to which Coe refers, is a sham; none of the money allocated by the US Congress has gone directly to the Vietnamese or has reached those most severely disabled from the cancers associated with Agent Orange.

For this reason, Coe's mention of "reconciliation" is profane, as if there were an equivalence between an invading superpower and its victims. His letter exemplifies the London Olympics' razor-wired, PR and money-fuelled totalitarian state within a state, which you enter, appropriately, through a Westfield mega shopping mall. How dare you complain about the missiles on the roof of your flats, hectored a magistrate to 86 residents of London's East End. How dare any of you protest at the "Zil car lanes", reminiscent of Moscow in the Soviet era, for Olympic apparatchiks and the boys from Dow and Coke. With the media in charge of Olympics excitement, as it was for 'Shock and Awe' in Iraq in 2003, now enter the man who played a starring role in making both spectacles possible. 

On 11 July, a so-called Olympics evening - "a coming together of the Labour tribe", declared the Labour Party leader Ed Milliband - celebrated its "star guest" Tony Blair and his 2005 "gift" of the Games and "provided the perfect opportunity for Blair's return to frontline politics", reported the Guardian. The organiser of this contrivance was Alistair Campbell, chief spinner of the bloodbath Blair and he gifted to the Iraqi people. And just as the victims of Dow Chemical are of no interest to the Olympic elite, so the epic criminality of Labour's star guest was unmentionable. 

The source of the Olympics' chaotic security is also unmentionable. As established studies in Britain have long conceded, it was the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the rest of the "war on terror" that served to recruit new jihadists and bolster other forms of resistance that led directly to the London bombs of 7/7. These were Blair's bombs. In his current rehabilitation, courtesy of his Olympics "legacy", there is the additional spin that Blair's huge post-Downing Street wealth is concentrated on charities.

The second letter I mentioned was sent to me by Josh Richards who lives in Bristol. In March 2003, Josh and four others set out to disable an American B-52 bomber based at RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire, before it could bomb Iraq. So did four other people. It was a non-violent action faithful to the Nuremberg principles that a war of aggression was the "paramount war crime". Josh was arrested and charged with planning to lay explosives. "This was based on the ludicrous idea," he wrote, "that some peanut butter I had on me was actually a bomb component. The charge was later abandoned after the Ministry of Defence performed extensive tests on my Tesco crunchy nut peanut butter."

During two trials and two hung juries, Josh was finally acquitted. It was a landmark case in which he spoke in open court about the genocidal embargo imposed upon Iraq by the British and US governments prior to their invasion and the false justifications of the "war on terror".  His acquittal meant that he had acted in the name of the law and his intention had been to save lives. 

The letter Josh wrote to me included a copy of my book, The New Rulers of the World, which, he pointed out, had provided him with the facts he needed for his defence. Meticulously page-marked and highlighted, it had accompanied Josh on a three-year journey through courtrooms and prison cells. Of all the letters I have received, Josh's epitomises a decency, modesty and determination of moral purpose that represent another Britain and antidotes to poisonous Olympic sponsors and rehabilitated warmongers. During these extraordinary times, such an example ought to give others heart and inspiration to reclaim this receding democracy.

19 July 2012

John Pilger:History is the enemy as 'brilliant' psy-ops become the news

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

John Pilger:The Leveson Inquiry into the British press - oh, what a lovely game

Rupert Murdoch is a bad man. His son James is also bad. Rebekah Brooks is allegedly bad. The News of the World was very bad; it hacked phones and pilloried people. British prime ministers grovelled before this iniquity. David Cameron even sent text messages to Brooks signed "LoL", and they all had parties in the Cotswolds with Jeremy Clarkson. Nods and winks were duly exchanged on the BSkyB deal.

Shock, horror.

Offering glimpses of the power and petty gangsterism of the British tabloid press, the inquiry conducted by Lord Leveson has, I suspect, shocked few people. As the soap has rolled on, bemusement has given way to boredom;  Tony Blair was allowed to whine about the Daily Mail's treatment of his wife until he and the inquiry's amoral smugness protecting him were exposed by a member of the public, David Lawley-Wakelin, who shouted, "Excuse me, this man should be arrested for war crimes." His Lordship duly apologised to the war criminal and the truth-teller was seen off.

Why Murdoch should complain about the British establishment has always mystified me. His interrogation, if that is the word, by Robert Jay QC, was a series of verbal marshmallows that Murdoch promptly spat out. When he described one of his own rambling, self-satisfied questions as "subtle", Jay received this deft dismissal from Murdoch: "I'm afraid I don't have much subtlety in me."

As the theatre critic Michael Billington reminded us recently, it was in the Spectator in 1955 that Henry Fairlie coined the term "the establishment", defining it as "the matrix of official and social relations within which power in Britain is exercised". For most of my career as a journalist, Murdoch has been an influential and admired member of this club: even a mentor to many of those now casting him as a "bad apple". His deeply cynical mantra, "I'm only giving the public what they want", was echoed by journalists and broadcasters as they lined up to dumb down their work and embrace the propaganda of corporatism that followed Murdoch's bloody move to Wapping in 1986.

More than 5,000 men and women were sacked, and countless families destroyed and suicides committed; and Murdoch could not have got away with it had Margaret Thatcher and the Metropolitan Police not given him total, often secret support, and journalists not lain face down on the floors of buses that drove perilously through the picket lines of their former, principled colleagues.

Cheering him on, if discreetly, were those now running what Max Hastings has called the "new establishment": the media's managerial middle class, often liberal to a fault, that was later to fall at the feet of  Murdoch's man Blair, the future war criminal, whose election as prime minister was celebrated in the Guardian with: "Few now sang England Arise, but England has risen all the same."

Leveson has asked nothing about how the respectable media complemented the Murdoch press in systematically promoting corrupt, mendacious, often violent political power whose crimes make phone-hacking barely a misdemeanour. The Leveson inquiry is a club matter, in which a member has caused such extraordinary public embarrassment he must be black-balled, so that nothing changes.

What jolly fun to hear Jeremy Paxman grass on Piers Morgan who, he gossiped, described to him how to hack phones. Paxman was asked nothing by Jay about the essential role of the BBC and its leading lights as state propagandists for illegal wars that have killed, maimed and dispossessed millions. How ironic that the lunch Paxman attended at the Daily Mirror appears to have been in 2002 when the Mirror, edited by Morgan, was the only Fleet Street newspaper uncompromisingly opposed to the coming invasion of Iraq: thus reflecting the wishes of the majority of the British public.

And what a wheeze it was to hear from the clubbable Andrew Marr, the BBC's ubiquitous voice: he of the super-injunction. Just as Murdoch's Sun declared in 1995 that it shared the rising Blair's "high moral values", so Marr, writing in the Observer in 1999, lauded the new prime minister's "substantial moral courage". What impressed Marr was Blair's "utter lack of cynicism", along with his bombing of Yugoslavia which would "save lives". By March 2003, Marr was the BBC's political editor. Standing in Downing Street on the night of the assault on Iraq, he rejoiced at the vindication of Blair who, he said, had promised "to take Baghdad without a bloodbath". The diametric opposite was true.  In hawking his self-serving book in 2010, Blair selected Marr for his "exclusive TV interview". During their convivial encounter they discussed an attack on Iran, the country Hillary Clinton once said she was prepared to "obliterate".

In the text messages disclosed by Leveson between Murdoch lobbyist Frederic Michel and Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, there is this one from Michel: "Very good on Marr as always". In a cable leaked to WikiLeaks, the US embassy in London urged Hillary Clinton  to be interviewed by the "congenial" Marr because he often "sets the political agenda for the nation" and "will offer maximum impact for your investment of time". Inquisitor Jay showed no interest.

When Alastair Campbell "gave evidence", Jay waved a copy of Blair's A Journey and quoted Blair's view of his chief collaborator as "a genius".

"Sweet," responded Campbell.

"And with great clunking balls as well," continued Jay QC, awaiting the laughter. The silence of 780,000 Iraqi widows was a presence.

Not a single opponent of the institutional power of the media has been called by Leveson, though farce is welcomed. Richard Desmond, who owns the Daily Express and a section of the British porn industry, during his appearance damned the Daily Mail as "Britain's worst enemy" and said the Press Complaints Commission "hated our guts".

Shock, horror. Or just sweet.

31 May 2012

John Pilger:Never forget that Bradley Manning, not gay marriage, is the issue

In the week Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he  ordered bombing attacks on Yemen, killing a reported 63 people, 28 of them children. When Obama recently announced he supported same-sex marriage, American planes had not long blown 14 Afghan civilians to bits. In both cases, the mass murder was barely news. What mattered were the cynical vacuities of a political celebrity, the product of a zeitgeist driven by the forces of consumerism and the media with the aim of diverting the struggle for social and economic justice.

The award of the Nobel Prize to the first black president because he "offered hope" was both absurd and an authentic expression of the lifestyle liberalism that controls much of political debate in the west. Same-sex marriage is one such distraction.  No "issue" diverts attention as successfully as this: not the free vote in Parliament on lowering the age of gay consent promoted by the noted libertarian and war criminal Tony Blair: not the cracks in "glass ceilings" that contribute nothing to women's liberation and merely amplify the demands of bourgeois privilege. 

Legal obstacles should not prevent people marrying each other, regardless of gender. But this is a civil and private matter; bourgeois acceptability is not yet a human right. The rights historically associated with marriage are those of property: capitalism itself.  Elevating the "right" of marriage above the right to life and real justice is as profane as seeking allies among those who deny life and justice to so many, from Afghanistan to Palestine.

On 9 May, hours before his Damascene declaration on same-sex marriage, Obama sent out messages to campaign donors making his new position clear. He asked for money. In response, according to the Washington Post, his campaign received a "massive surge of contributions". The following evening, with the news now dominated by his "conversion", he attended a fundraising party at the Los Angeles home of the actor George Clooney. "Hollywood," reported the Associated Press, "is home to some of the most high-profile backers of gay marriage, and the 150 donors who are paying $40,000 to attend Clooney's dinner will no doubt feel invigorated by Obama's watershed announcement the day before." The Clooney party is expected to raise a record $15 million for Obama's re-election and will be followed by "yet another fundraiser in New York sponsored by gay and Latino Obama supporters". 

The width of a cigarette paper separates the Democratic and Republican parties on economic and foreign policies. Both represent the super rich and the impoverishment of a nation from which trillions of tax dollars have been transferred to a permanent war industry and banks that are little more than criminal enterprises. Obama is as reactionary and violent as George W. Bush, and in some ways he is worse. His personal speciality is the use of Hellfire missile-armed drones against defenceless people. Under cover of a partial withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, he has sent US special forces to 120 countries where death squads are trained. He has revived the old cold war on two fronts: against China in Asia and with a "shield" of missiles aimed at Russia. The first black president has presided over the incarceration and surveillance of greater numbers of  black people than were enslaved in 1850. He has prosecuted more whistleblowers - truth-tellers - than any of his predecessors.  His vice-president, Joe Biden, a zealous warmonger, has called WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange a "hi-tech terrorist".  Biden has also converted to the cause of gay marriage.

One of America's true heroes is the gay soldier Bradley Manning, the whistleblower alleged to have provided WikiLeaks with the epic evidence of American carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the Obama administration that smeared his homosexuality as weird, and it was Obama himself who declared a man convicted of no crime to be guilty.

Who among the fawners and luvvies at Clooney's Hollywood moneyfest shouted, "Remember Bradley Manning"? To my knowledge, no prominent spokesperson for gay rights has spoken against Obama's and Biden's hypocrisy in claiming to support same-sex marriage while terrorising a gay man whose courage should be an inspiration to all, regardless of sexual preference. 

Obama's historic achievement as president of the United States has been to silence the anti-war and social justice movement associated with the Democratic Party.  Such deference to an extremism disguised by and embodied in a clever, amoral operator, betrays the rich tradition of popular protest in the US. Perhaps the Occupy movement is said to be in this tradition; perhaps not. 

The truth is that what matters to those who aspire to control our lives is not skin pigment or gender, or whether or not we are gay, but the class we serve. The goals are to ensure that we look inward on ourselves, not outward to others and never comprehend the sheer scale of undemocratic power, and to that we collaborate in isolating those who resist. This attrition of criminalising, brutalising and banning protest can too easily turn western democracies into states of fear. 

On 12 May, in Sydney, Australia, home of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, a protest parade in support of gay marriage filled the city centre. The police looked on benignly. It was a showcase of liberalism. Three days later, there was to be a march to commemorate the Nakba ("The Catastrophe'), the day of mourning when Israel expelled Palestinians from their land.  A police ban had to be overturned by the Supreme Court.

That is why the people of Greece ought to be our inspiration. By their own painful experience they know their freedom can only be regained by standing up to the German Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and their own quislings in Athens. People across Latin America have achieved this: the indignados of Bolivia who saw off the water privateers and the Argentinians who told the IMF what to do with their debt. The courage of disobedience was their weapon. Remember Bradley Manning.

16 May 2012

John Pilger:You are all suspects now. What are you going to do about it?

 

You are all potential terrorists. It matters not that you live in Britain, the United States, Australia or the Middle East. Citizenship is effectively abolished.  Turn on your computer and the US Department of Homeland Security's National Operations Center may monitor whether you are typing not merely "al-Qaeda", but "exercise", "drill", "wave", "initiative" and "organisation": all proscribed words. The British government's announcement that it intends to spy on every email and phone call is old hat. The satellite vacuum cleaner known as Echelon has been doing this for years. What has changed is that a state of permanent war has been launched by the United States and a police state is consuming western democracy.

What are you going to do about it?

In Britain, on instructions from the CIA, secret courts are to deal with "terror suspects". Habeas Corpus is dying. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that five men, including three British citizens, can be extradited to the US even though none except one has been charged with a crime. All have been imprisoned for years under the 2003 US/UK Extradition Treaty which was signed one month after the criminal invasion of Iraq. The European Court had condemned the treaty as likely to lead to "cruel and unusual punishment".  One of the men, Babar Ahmad, was awarded 63,000 pounds compensation for 73 recorded injuries he sustained in the custody of the Metropolitan Police. Sexual abuse, the signature of fascism, was high on the list. Another man is a schizophrenic who has suffered a complete mental collapse and is in Broadmoor secure hospital; another is a suicide risk. To the Land of the Free, they go - along with young Richard O'Dwyer, who faces 10 years in shackles and an orange jump suit because he allegedly infringed US copyright on the internet.

As the law is politicised and Americanised, these travesties are not untypical. In upholding the conviction of a London university student, Mohammed Gul, for disseminating "terrorism" on the internet, Appeal Court judges in London ruled that "acts... against the armed forces of a state anywhere in the world which sought to influence a government and were made for political purposes" were now crimes. Call to the dock Thomas Paine, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela.

What are you going to do about it?

The prognosis is clear now: the malignancy that Norman Mailer called "pre fascist" has metastasized. The US attorney-general, Eric Holder, defends the "right" of his government to assassinate American citizens. Israel, the protege, is allowed to aim its nukes at nukeless Iran. In this looking glass world, the lying is panoramic. The massacre of 17 Afghan civilians on 11 March, including at least nine children and four women, is attributed to a "rogue" American soldier. The "authenticity" of this is vouched by President Obama himself, who had "seen a video" and regards it as "conclusive proof". An independent Afghan parliamentary investigation produces eyewitnesses who give detailed evidence of as many as 20 soldiers, aided by a helicopter, ravaging their villages, killing and raping: a standard, if marginally more murderous US special forces "night raid".

Take away the videogame technology of killing - America's contribution to modernity - and the behaviour is traditional. Immersed in comic-book righteousness, poorly or brutally trained, frequently racist, obese and led by a corrupt officer class, American forces transfer the homicide of home to faraway places whose impoverished struggles they cannot comprehend. A nation founded on the genocide of the native population never quite kicks the habit. Vietnam was "Indian country" and its "slits" and "gooks" were to be "blown away".

The blowing away of hundreds of mostly women and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 was also a "rogue" incident and, profanely, an "American tragedy" (the cover headline of Newsweek). Only one of 26 men prosecuted was convicted and he was let go by President Richard Nixon. My Lai is in Quang Ngai province where, as I learned as a reporter, an estimated 50,000 people were killed by American troops, mostly in what they called "free fire zones". This was the model of modern warfare: industrial murder.

Like Iraq and Libya, Afghanistan is a theme park for the beneficiaries of America's new permanent war: Nato, the armaments and hi-tech companies, the media and a "security" industry whose lucrative contamination is a contagion on everyday life. The conquest or "pacification" of territory is unimportant. What matters is the pacification of you, the cultivation of your indifference.
What are you going to do about it?

The descent into totalitarianism has landmarks. Any day now, the Supreme Court in London will decide whether the WikiLeaks editor, Julian Assange, is to be extradited to Sweden. Should this final appeal fail, the facilitator of truth-telling on an epic scale, who is charged with no crime, faces solitary confinement and interrogation on ludicrous sex allegations. Thanks to a secret deal between the US and Sweden, he can be "rendered" to the American gulag at any time. In his own country, Australia, prime minister Julia Gillard has conspired with those in Washington she calls her "true mates" to ensure her innocent fellow citizen is fitted for his orange jump suit just in case he should make it home. In February, her government wrote a "WikiLeaks Amendment" to the extradition treaty between Australia and the US that makes it easier for her "mates" to get their hands on him. She has even given them the power of approval over Freedom of Information searches - so that the world outside can be lied to, as is customary.

What are you going to do about it?

26 April 2012

Mark Steel: How should we sort the crisis at Heathrow? By holding the Olympics there instead!

Visiting tourists could be entertained by turning the queues into a formal marathon

It's encouraging that UK Border Control is joining in the Olympic spirit by making anyone arriving to watch the Games wait two and a quarter hours to have their passport checked, which is roughly the time it will take to run the marathon. Maybe the Government could make the queuing even more exciting by turning it into a race. Someone could run the marathon course while people are waiting to pass through passport control, with a commentary going, "The runner is crossing Tower Bridge, but what a spurt from our passenger as she dramatically moves forward nine inches, though she does look weary and is screaming for water."

There's an obvious solution to the worry of this long wait upsetting tourists who come for the Games, which is to hold some of the events in the arrivals lounge at Heathrow. Then they'd say, "It was a bit frustrating to spend the first day creeping past a thick blue rope towards immigration control, but at least we saw a fascinating volleyball quarter final between Peru and Croatia."

Then the tourist industry could place attractions by the queue, with brochures boasting, "Why not take a ride on the magnificent Heathrow Eye, a big wheel that takes you up to the roof of the airport where the views stretch as far as the baggage claim area, in a breathtaking 30-minute odyssey that lands just in time for you to shuffle up another two feet."

The Changing of the Guard could take place by the counter where you change money, and Madame Tussauds could place Brad Pitt and Saddam Hussein in the queue for fun. Then we could assure people they'd enjoy an unforgettable week and be allowed into the country with just enough time to start queuing to leave.

The queuing shouldn't be a surprise because the whole point of Heathrow is to make millions of people queue. You queue for hours to check in, at security, at a departure gate, and can only survive by putting yourself into a trance and not even caring what the next queue is for. Someone in a uniform could take down your trousers and prod your arse with a cactus, then you could be ushered past a sign that said "Remove your toenails" before a man dressed as The Riddler squirted custard in your ear – and you'd accept this must be something they've had to do since 9/11 and not complain.

Worse than the inefficiency is how Heathrow has succeeded in making travel, one of the most romantic aspects of life, into a soulless, sterile, trial of endurance. So if history's most charismatic travellers were to journey across the world now, their diaries would go, "To lift spirits we sang, shared a biscuit between us, and showed each other photos of our loved ones. Then Simpkins appeared to crack, screaming and kneeling on the floor making barking noises. "Don't worry," Shackleton reassured him. "Next year, we'll go to Norfolk."

The Independent May 4 2012