John Pilger: The new world war - the silence is a lie - TruePublica
John Pilger: The new world war – the silence is a lie
Every weekend we feature an article written by highly
acclaimed film-maker, author and journalist John Pilger who, with such
foresight encapsulates how our world is being shaped by corporations,
corrupted political systems, propaganda, globalisation and war. This
piece was written originally September 2008 and is just as applicable
today, if not more so.
Britain’s political conference season of 2008 will be remembered as
The Great Silence. Politicians have come and gone and their mouths have
moved in front of large images of themselves, and they often wave at
someone. There has been lots of news about each other. Adam Boulton, the
political editor of Sky News, and billed as “the husband of Blair aide
Anji Hunter”, has published a book of gossip derived from his
“unrivalled access to No 10”. His revelation is that Tony Blair’s
mouthpiece told lies. The war criminal himself has been absent, but the
former mouthpiece has been signing his own book of gossip, and waving.
The club is celebrating itself, including all those, Labour and Tory,
who gave the war criminal a standing ovation on his last day in
parliament and who have yet to vote on, let alone condemn, Britain’s
part in the wanton human, social and physical destruction of an entire
nation. Instead, there are happy debates such as, “Can hope win?” and,
my favourite, “Can foreign policy be a Labour strength?” As Harold
Pinter said of unmentionable crimes: “Nothing ever happened. Even while
it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no
interest.”
The Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliott, has written that the
Prime Minister “resembles a tragic hero in a Hardy novel: an essentially
good man brought down by one error of judgement”. What is this one
error of judgement? The bank-rolling of two murderous colonial
adventures? No. The unprecedented growth of the British arms industry
and the sale of weapons to the poorest countries? No. The replacement of
manufacturing and public service by an arcane cult serving the
ultra-rich? No. The Prime Minister’s “folly” is “postponing the election
last year”. This is the March Hare Factor.
Reality can be detected, however, by applying the Orwell Rule and
inverting public pronouncements and headlines, such as “Aggressor Russia
facing pariah status, US warns”, thereby identifying the correct
pariah; or by crossing the invisible boundaries that fix the boundaries
of political and media discussion. “When truth is replaced by silence,”
said the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”
Understanding this silence is critical in a society in which news has
become noise. Silence covers the truth that Britain’s political parties
have converged and now follow the single-ideology model of the United
States. This is different from the political consensus of half a century
ago that produced what was known as social democracy. Today’s political
union has no principled social democratic premises. Debate has become
just another weasel word and principle, like the language of Chaucer, is
bygone. That the poor and the state fund the rich is a given, along
with the theft of public services, known as privatisation. This was
spelt out by Margaret Thatcher but, more importantly, by new Labour’s
engineers. In The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? Peter
Mandelson and Roger Liddle declared Britain’s new “economic strengths”
to be its transnational corporations, the “aerospace” industry (weapons)
and “the pre-eminence of the City of London”. The rest was to be
asset-stripped, including the peculiar British pursuit of selfless
public service. Overlaying this was a new social authoritarianism guided
by a hypocrisy based on “values”. Mandelson and Liddle demanded “a
tough discipline” and a “hardworking majority” and the “proper
bringing-up [sic] of children”. And in formally launching his
Murdochracy, Blair used “moral” and “morality” 18 times in a speech he
gave in Australia as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, who had recently found
God.
