Comment #3

time*treat — Sun, 29 May 2011 09:16:42 GMT

Good article.

Comment #2

TigerAngel — Sun, 29 May 2011 06:21:30 GMT

John Pilger is a Brit and I think he prolly doesn't watch much American news channels. Murdering innocents around the world to rebuild them better than before doesn't make sense. It's more to pilage their resources and take control of them under world government. It's not like after WW2 rebuilding those countries.

Comment #1

GASMETERGUY — Sun, 29 May 2011 02:08:33 GMT

If he thinks there was no genocide in Kosovo, then he is just ignorant of the facts. He might be right about Bahrain. The facts of that case are still coming in. To call what we are doing in Afghanistan is anything but "Anglo-American Reign of Terror" is anything but. The absolute best thing that can happen to any country in the world is to be defeated by the U.S. military. Then we come in with our money, our technology, our sweat and our blood and rebuild them big... [ More ]

Original Blog Entry: Welcome to the Violent World of Mr. Hopey Changey

TigerAngel — Sat, 28 May 2011 19:15:37 GMT

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

... [ More ]