John Pilger - Silencing America as it prepares for war - TruePublica
John Pilger – Silencing America as it prepares for war
Returning to the United States in an election year, I am
struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns,
starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw
his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American
way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the
Democratic Party’s rigged convention. The great counter revolution had
begun.
The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had dared
link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When
Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to
lose”, she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America’s victims
in faraway places.
“We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending
your freedom. Now don’t you forget it.” So said a National Parks Service
guide as I filmed last week at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He
was addressing a school party of young teenagers in bright orange
T-shirts. As if by rote, he inverted the truth about Vietnam into an
unchallenged lie.
The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and
dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young
minds, not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own
lives. A friend of mine, a marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam,
was often asked, “Which side did you fight on?”
A few years ago, I attended a popular exhibition called “The Price of
Freedom” at the venerable Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The
lines of ordinary people, mostly children shuffling through a Santa’s
grotto of revisionism, were dispensed a variety of lies: the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved “a million lives”; Iraq was
“liberated [by] air strikes of unprecedented precision”. The theme was
unerringly heroic: only Americans pay the price of freedom.
The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders but also for the resilience of an
enduring silence about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of
the members of the United Nations have felt Washington’s boot,
overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and
boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal – Truman,
Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.
The breathtaking record of perfidy is so mutated in the public mind,
wrote the late Harold Pinter, that it “never happened …Nothing ever
happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t
matter. It was of no interest. It didn’t matter… “. Pinter expressed a
mock admiration for what he called “a quite clinical manipulation of
power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a
brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
