Welcome to the Violent World of
Mr. Hopey Changey
By John Pilger
May 26, 2011
"Information Clearing
House" -- -- When Britain lost control of Egypt in 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden said he wanted the nationalist president Gamal Abdel Nasser “destroyed … murdered … I don’t give a <snip> if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt”. Those insolent Arabs, Winston Churchill had urged in 1951, should be driven “into the gutter from which they should never have emerged”.
The language of colonialism may have been modified; the
spirit and the hypocrisy are unchanged. A new imperial phase is unfolding in
direct response to the Arab uprising that began in January and has shocked
Washington and Europe, causing an Eden-style panic. The loss of the Egyptian
tyrant Mubarak was grievous, though not irretrievable; an American-backed
counter-revolution is under way as the military regime in Cairo is seduced with
new bribes and power shifting from the street to political groups that did not
initiate the revolution. The western aim, as ever, is to stop authentic
democracy and reclaim control.
Libya is the immediate opportunity. The
Nato attack on Libya, with the UN Security Council assigned to mandate a bogus
“no fly zone” to “protect civilians”, is strikingly similar to the final
destruction of Yugoslavia in 1999. There was no UN cover for the bombing of
Serbia and the “rescue” of Kosovo, yet the propaganda echoes today. Like
Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar Gaddafi is a “new Hitler”, plotting “genocide”
against his people. There is no evidence of this, as there was no genocide in
Kosovo. In Libya there is a tribal civil war; and the armed uprising against
Gaddafi has long been appropriated by the Americans, French and British, their
planes attacking residential Tripoli with uranium-tipped missiles and the
submarine HMS Triumph firing Tomahawk missiles, a repeat of the “shock and awe”
in Iraq that left thousands of civilians dead and maimed. As in Iraq, the
victims, which include countless incinerated Libyan army conscripts, are media
unpeople.
In the “rebel” east, the terrorising and killing of black
African immigrants is not news. On 22 May, a rare piece in the Washington Post
described the repression, lawlessness and death squads in the “liberated zones”
just as visiting EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, declared she had
found only “great aspirations” and “leadership qualities”. In demonstrating
these qualities, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the “rebel leader” and Gaddafi’s justice
minister until February, pledged, “Our friends … will have the best opportunity
in future contracts with Libya.” The east holds most of Libya’s oil, the
greatest reserves in Africa. In March the rebels, with expert foreign guidance,
“transferred” to Benghazi the Libyan Central Bank, a wholly owned state
institution. This is unprecedented. Meanwhile, the US and the EU “froze” almost
US$100 billion in Libyan funds, “the largest sum ever blocked”, according to
official statements. It is the biggest bank robbery in history.
The
French elite are enthusiastic robbers and bombers. Nicholas Sarkozy’s imperial
design is for a French-dominated Mediterranean Union (UM), which would allow
France to “return” to its former colonies in North Africa and profit from
privileged investment and cheap labour. Gaddafi described the Sarkozy plan as
“an insult” that was “taking us for fools”. The Merkel government in Berlin
agreed, fearing its old foe would diminish Germany in the EU, and abstained in
the Security Council vote on Libya.
Like the attack on Yugoslavia and the
charade of Milosevic’s trial, the International Criminal Court is being used by
the US, France and Britain to prosecute Gaddafi while his repeated offers of a
ceasefire are ignored. Gaddafi is a Bad Arab. David Cameron’s government and its
verbose top general want to eliminate this Bad Arab, like the Obama
administration killed a famously Bad Arab in Pakistan recently. The crown prince
of Bahrain, on the other hand, is a Good Arab. On 19 May, he was warmly welcomed
to Britain by Cameron with a photo-call on the steps of 10 Downing Street. In
March, the same crown prince slaughtered unarmed protestors and allowed Saudi
forces to crush his country’s democracy movement. The Obama administration has
rewarded Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive regimes on earth, with a $US60
billion arms deal, the biggest in US history. The Saudis have the most oil. They
are the Best Arabs.
The assault on Libya, a crime under the Nuremberg
standard, is Britain’s 46th military “intervention” in the Middle East since
1945. Like its imperial partners, Britain’s goal is to control Africa’s oil.
Cameron is not Anthony Eden, but almost. Same school. Same values. In the
media-pack, the words colonialism and imperialism are no longer used, so that
the cynical and the credulous can celebrate state violence in its more palatable
form.
And as “Mr. Hopey Changey” (the name that Ted Rall, the great
American cartoonist, gives Barack Obama), is fawned upon by the British elite
and launches another insufferable presidential campaign, the Anglo-American
reign of terror proceeds in Afghanistan and elsewhere, with the murder of people
by unmanned drones – a US/Israel innovation, embraced by Obama. For the record,
on a scorecard of imposed misery, from secret trials and prisons and the
hounding of whistleblowers and the criminalising of dissent to the incarceration
and impoverishment of his own people, mostly black people, Obama is as bad as
George W. Bush.
The Palestinians understand all this. As their young
people courageously face the violence of Israel’s blood-racism, carrying the
keys of their grandparents’ stolen homes, they are not even included in Mr.
Hopey Changey’s list of peoples in the Middle East whose liberation is long
overdue. What the oppressed need, he said on 19 May, is a dose of “America’s
interests [that] are essential to them”. He insults us all.
www.johnpilger.com
