Hi Gustl,
I've been sitting on the sidelines enjoying the cut and
thrust of the debate on so-called "Godless" Constitution. People are at
their most interesting when they get into definitions. That's when the
nitpick of academia surfaces and we get down to the "how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin" level. All good clean fun if it weren't for the
fact that much of our behaviour is predicated on belief systems.
For that reason it makes good sense to keep updating one's beliefs according
to new information. Which prompts the question: "Whose information?" Or
rather, who determines what information we get to see?
It was well said when it was said that where there is no vision the people
perish. To maintain vision we need prophets, seers, critics. But above all
we need courage. If the unexamined life is not worth living to whom do we
turn for the tools?
Perhaps a latter day seer such as the one below?
Regards,
Bob.
FIRST, THEY ATTACK THE PAST
February 18, 2005
by John Pilger
How does thought control work in societies that call themselves free? Why
are famous journalists so eager, almost as a reflex, to minimize the
culpability of political leaders such as Bush and Blair who share
responsibility for the unprovoked attack on a defenseless people, for laying
to waste their land, and for killing at least 100,000 people, most of them
civilians, having sought to justify this epic crime with demonstrable lies?
Why does a BBC reporter describe the invasion of Iraq as "a vindication for
Blair"? Why have broadcasters never associated the British or American state
with terrorism? Why have such privileged communicators, with unlimited
access to the facts, lined up to describe an unobserved, unverified,
illegitimate, cynically manipulated election, held under a brutal
occupation, as "democratic" with the pristine aim of being "free and fair"?
Do they not read history? Or is the history they know, or choose to know,
subject to such amnesia and omission that it produces a world view as seen
only through a one-way moral mirror? There is no suggestion of conspiracy.
This one-way mirror ensures that most of humanity is regarded in terms of
its usefulness to "us," its desirability or expendability, its worthiness or
unworthiness: for example, the notion of "good" Kurds in Iraq and "bad"
Kurds in Turkey. The unerring assumption is that "we" in the dominant West
have moral standards superior to "them." One of "their" dictators (often a
former client of ours, like Saddam Hussein) kills thousands of people and he
is declared a monster, a second Hitler. When one of our leaders does the
same, he is viewed, at worst like Blair, in Shakespearean terms. Those who
kill people with car bombs are "terrorists"; those who kill far more people
with cluster bombs are the noble occupants of a "quagmire."
Historical amnesia can spread quickly. Only 10 years after the Vietnam war,
which I reported, an opinion poll in the United States found that a third of
Americans could not remember which side their government had supported. This
demonstrated the insidious power of the dominant propaganda, that the war
was essentially a conflict of "good" Vietnamese against "bad" Vietnamese, in
which the Americans became "involved," bringing democracy to the people of
southern Vietnam faced with a "communist threat."
Such a false and dishonest assumption permeated the media coverage, with
honorable exceptions. The truth is that the longest war of the 20th century
was a war waged against Vietnam, north and south, communist and
noncommunist, by America. It was an unprovoked invasion of their homeland
and their lives, just like the invasion of Iraq. Amnesia ensures that, while
the relatively few deaths of the invaders are constantly acknowledged, the
deaths of up to 5 million Vietnamese are consigned to oblivion.
What are the roots of this? Certainly, "popular culture," especially
Hollywood movies, can decide what and how little we remember. Selective
education at a tender age performs the same task. I have been sent a widely
used revision guide for students of modern world history, on Vietnam and the
Cold War. This is learned by 14- to 16-year-olds in British schools, sitting
for the critical GCSE exam. It informs their understanding of a pivotal
historical period, which must influence how they make sense of today's news
from Iraq and elsewhere.
It is shocking. It says that under the 1954 Geneva agreement: "Vietnam was
partitioned into communist north and democratic south." In one sentence,
truth is dispatched. The final declaration of the Geneva conference divided
Vietnam "temporarily" until free national elections were held on July 26,
1956. There was little doubt that Ho Chi Minh would win and form Vietnam's
first democratically elected government. Certainly, President Eisenhower was
in no doubt of this. "I have never talked with a person knowledgeable in
Indochinese affairs," he wrote, "who did not agree that ... 80 percent of
the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their
leader."
Not only did the United States refuse to allow the UN to administer the
agreed elections two years later, but the "democratic" regime in the south
was an invention. One of the inventors, the CIA official Ralph McGehee,
describes in his masterly book Deadly Deceits how a brutal expatriate
mandarin, Ngo Dinh Diem, was imported from New Jersey to be "president" and
a fake government was put in place. "The CIA," he wrote, "was ordered to
sustain that illusion through propaganda [placed in the media]."
Phony elections were arranged, hailed in the West as "free and fair," with
American officials fabricating "an 83 percent turnout despite Vietcong
terror." The guide alludes to none of this, nor that "the terrorists," whom
the Americans called the Vietcong, were also southern Vietnamese defending
their homeland against the American invasion and whose resistance was
popular. For Vietnam, read Iraq.
The tone of this tract is from the point of view of "us." There is no sense
that a national liberation movement existed in Vietnam, merely "a communist
threat," merely the propaganda that "the USA was terrified that many other
countries might become communist and help the USSR ö they didn't want to be
outnumbered," merely that President Johnson "was determined to keep South
Vietnam communist-free."
This proceeds quickly to the Tet Offensive in 1968, which "ended in the loss
of thousands of American lives ö 14,000 in 1969 ö most were young men."
There is no mention of the millions of Vietnamese lives also lost in the
offensive. And America merely began "a bombing campaign": there is no
mention of the greatest tonnage of bombs dropped in the history of warfare,
of a military strategy that was deliberately designed to force millions of
people to abandon their homes, and of chemicals used in a manner that
profoundly changed the environment and the genetic order,
leaving a once-bountiful land all but ruined.
This revision guide reflects the bias and distortions of the official
syllabi, such as the prestigious syllabus from Oxford and Cambridge, used
all over the world as a model. Its Cold War section refers to Soviet
"expansionism" and the "spread" of communism; there is not a word about the
"spread" of rapacious America. One of its "key questions" is: "How
effectively did the USA contain the spread of communism?" Good versus evil
for untutored minds.
"Phew, loads for you to learn here..." say the authors of the revision
guide, "so get it learned right now." Phew, the British empire did not
happen; there is nothing about the atrocious colonial wars that were models
for the successor power, America, in Indonesia, Vietnam, Chile, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, to name but a few along modern history's imperial trail of blood,
of which Iraq is the latest.
And now Iran? The drumbeat has already begun. How many more innocent people
have to die before those who filter the past and the present wake up to
their moral
responsibility to protect our memory and the lives of human beings?
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