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Review :: Peace |
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On Modern Imperialism and its Hidden Goals |
Current rating: 0 |
by John Pilger
Email: mbatko (nospam) lycos.com (verified) |
19 Jan 2005
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The expropriation of the state by large corpor-ations (privatization) and the undermining of traditional values (self-sufficiency, family, democracy, religion and a just economy) recall Vietnam, South Africa and many other countries. |
“HIDDEN GOALS”
John Pilger on Modern Imperialism
By Zeit-Fragen
[This book review originally published in: Zeit-Fragen Nr.1 1/2/2005 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.zeit.de.]
[John Pilger is not an unknown person. The Australian born in 1939 in Sydney was “Reporter of the Year” in 1970. For nearly 25 years he was a (war-) correspondent of the “Daily Mirror” (London) in Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Bangladesh and Biafra. In 1987 he founded the journal “News on Sunday”. This project failed. Afterwards Pilger worked as a free journalist, well known in the Anglo-Saxon realm and ignored in Germany and Switzerland. He produced many documentary films broadcast by the BBC. He appeared before 300,000 people at the largest peace demonstration in London in September 2002.]
lg. In 1980 John Pilger was awarded the UN media prize. In 2003 he was “media person of the year”. His book translated into German is based on two English editions from 1998 and 2002. Pilger’s basic conviction is that the rich states and multinational corporations led by the United States exploit and oppress the world, protected by a far-reaching worldwide-enforced conformity of the media. He followed this development with his own eyes. Impressive reports contained in his book provide the evidence. Pilger brings to light “the hidden goals of governments, corporations and their bureaucracies”. His book is a “homage to those journalists who by refusing to be instrumentalized in the service of power contribute to its demystification and control”.
MANIPULATION IN THE (CONTROLLED) MEDIA OF THE WORLD
The experienced journalist turns his special attention to the enormous manipulation in and with the media. “90% of press reports from all over the world and current political reporting go back to a smaller and smaller circle of ever richer and more powerful information sources”. Most news headlines come from the three news agencies AP, Reuters and AFP. In 1980 Peter Watkins, formerly with the BBC, said that middle management exercises greater pressure and censorship than a television station could ever exercise with the terms “quality”, “professionalism” and “objectivity”. The third world with its billions of inhabitants hardly occurs in the short-winded broadcasts.
THE TRUE STATE OF THE WORLD IS VEILED
Pilger rightly concludes that “a refined system of exploitation has been forced on more than 90 states with structural adjustment programs since the 1980s largely unnoticed by inhabitants of the northern hemisphere.” “Reforms” mean “destruction”.
PROBLEMS ARE BLURRED
“Behind the façade of objectivity and journalistic professional ethos, news follows the same ideological pattern presented by the cult of the market. News is clothed in a political and social vocabulary that veils the real truth. Thus the systematically spreading impoverishment of a quarter of the population in Great Britain, the US and vast parts of Europe is stylized as the problem of the socially non-conformist and depraved. Solving the problem of redistributing the immense treasures appropriated by the rich at the expense of the poor is hardly seriously discussed.”
The WHO with the US, Europe, Canada and Japan as well as the “Washington triumvirate” (World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury Department) is hidden behind all the impoverishment with their adjustment programs.”
WARS AS ENTERTAINMENT
Wars are also trivialized. For “consumers”, they are processed into “easily digestible fast food”. The two Gulf wars were passed off as “wonders of technical achievements” that demanded “incredibly few casualties”, a journalist said in 1981.
THE JOURNALIST MADE OF GLASS
Five supra-regional British newspapers are produced in Carnary Wharf, an obelisk made of glass in a quarter of London, Pilger reports. This building is also called the “ministry of truth”. The frightened visitor must overcome several “security zones”. The floor of the “Daily Mirror” is monitored by video cameras. Security forces patrol the editorial rooms. No one leaves the writing desk without a personal chip-card. All this removes writers as far as possible from the readers.
NO SOLID INVESTIGATIONS ANY MORE
50% of the material of the large daily newspapers today originates from PR-agents. “Think tanks” take over the function of independent journalism. Since 1980, 8000 PR-tested “environmental specialists” work in Washington. In her book “Global Spin”, Sharon Beder describes how the “think tanks” paved the way for Reagan and the “new right”. The environmental theme fizzles away peacefully.
A REPORT FROM VIETNAM
In an example from Vietnam, the passionately committed author describes how a country that actually won the war is today the loser in a very different “war”, the daily war of the globalized market. At that time the war began with a propaganda lie. The CIA loaded a junket with weapons that then took the rap as evidence for Hanoi’s war preparations. This “discovery” was sold by the US to the international press.
Pilger paints a sensitive picture of present-day Vietnam. The dreadful consequences of war strike the visitor everywhere. In the “peak times” of the war, 50,000 civilians were killed a year. These were only the dead, not the injured, war-disabled and traumatized. A single reporter among 600, Seymour Hirsch, reported in the US on the massacre of My Lai committed by GI’s. “An American tragedy” was the headline about My Lai on the cover of Newsweek at that time. With this little but effective shift, America relieved itself of responsibility for this war crime – as though there were no responsible persons. Correspondingly it was said that the US was “dragged” into this war.
HOLLYWOOD PREPARES WARS – PENTAGON WRITES THE SCRIPT
Hollywood played a role in recruiting the American intervention army at that time. John Wayne who shirked action in the Second World War had the idea of a “patriotic” film about US combat in Vietnam. Thus arose the propaganda film “The Green Devil” for which the producer, Wayne’s son, admitted that the Pentagon wrote the script. According to film director Delbert Mann, half of the marine soldiers in 1960 said the film “Death Commando” led them to choose this “calling”. In that film John Wayne played Sergeant Stryker, a hard but just soldier. Delbert Mann concludes: “Whoever was an infantry officer with a low-grade service rank in Vietnam at the end of the 1960s must have watched `Death Commando’ in the movie theater as a teenager.” Is this any different today?
“REFORMS” DESTROY A COUNTRY
In 1994, the critical Canadian economist Michel Chossudovsky (“Global Brutal”) wrote about the terrible effects of the “reforms” demanded for Vietnam by the World Bank, the IMF and the Asian Development Bank. The consequences were far-reaching. An agriculture committed to self-sufficiency was destroyed. Vietnam must now export coffee instead of cultivating something more sensible and useful. Many citizens cannot pay the high price of rice any more in a country with a classical cultivation of rice!
Nearly 70% of the population lives in absolute poverty today; 50% of the children are chronically malnourished. For Chossudovsky, as Pilger quotes, “the reforms were bound with the hidden intention of destabilizing Vietnam’s industrial foundation. The iron-, oil-, gas-, ore industry and mining, cement- and steel production were to be restructured under the control of mammoth Japanese corporations and taken over by foreign capital…”
INCONSPICUOUS DICTATORSHIPS – EXPORT TRADING ZONES
“Export trading zones” shoot up from the ground, for example in south Saigon. A Taiwanese corporation owns this trading zone. Working conditions prevail as in the darkest 19th century. Young girls spin cotton on old-fashioned machines for 12 hours a day and earn $20 a month. There are no unions or protective clothing. In the normal case, they can go to the washroom three times daily for five minutes. That is the only pause allowed to them. Slaves often had a better lot.
The export trading zone south Saigon has its own money market, police and a customs office, a kind of city-state. The administrator predicts that Vietnamese cities will look like this export trading zone in the course of the next 100 years. “Flanking measures” exist for oppressing and humiliating the people. Prostitution is legalized in Vietnam. The family is subjected ever more strongly to commerce.
DISMANTLING EDUCATION THROUGH REFORMS
The education system is privatized. “Teachers when not forcibly transported in `social projects’ like caring for gangs of youth must accept salary cuts to less than 10 dollars a month.” By 1992, 750,000 children dropped out of the education system. School fees are prescribed in the constitution of the country officially governed by communists. The once exemplary basic medical care was driven down dramatically. Epidemics are increasing again. Cholera, malaria and jungle fever are spreading. Following the privatization of the hospitals, a patient must pay a 6 dollar security deposit, for many a third of their monthly salary. A daily bed fee of 4 dollars is charged. Many die prematurely because they don’t have any money for medicines and the hospital stay.
SOUTH AFRICA TODAY
John Pilger presents similar impressive reports about South Africa. He looks behind the backdrop of the land liberated from apartheid without sharing in the worldwide media cult around Nelson Mandela. His reports from Cape Town are shocking. “Cape Town reminds me somehow of Palestine: Rural beauty on one side and a slum whenever one turns around. Under the incredible expanse of the African sky, one sees the silhouettes of women lining up on a hilltop to draw water from a well from which cattle also drink and leave their excrement. Nothing is usually left to people in rural areas than to run almost a kilometer to the next watering place. They often have no sanitary facilities, no electricity, no telephone and no work. Children emaciated to shadows and surrendered to fate run along the roads with their burdens.”
In the town of Butterworth, T-shirts are manufactured for the designer brands Gap, Fila and Daniel Hecter under miserable factory conditions. The firm is in Malaysian control, “a classic example of globalization”. Five companies led by the complex Anglo-American Corporation, still hold three-quarters of the capital stock on the Johannesburg money market. A British corporation plans to privatize and control the water supply. Maggie Thatcher sits on the board of directors. Nelson Mandela confided to the author in 1994: “the government of the country is now counting on privatization”. Still Pilger sees hope for the African continent. The social structure is not yet destroyed. “Long treated as sub-humans, they (the black South Africans) still preserve a generosity of heart and mind, a self-confident dignity and skill that will never be reached by their oppressors.”
SWITZERLAND, CASTLE IN A LAKE, WATCH OUT
Pilger quotes a famous saying from Martin Niemoller:
“When the Nazis came for the communists, I kept silent since I wasn’t a communist. When they locked up social democrats, I was silent since I wasn’t a social democrat. When they came for unionists, I did not protest since I wasn’t a unionist. When they took the Jews away, I did not protest since I wasn’t a Jew. When they took me away, no one was there any more who could protest.”
What occurs today in Europe, the expropriation of the state by large corporations (privatization) and the undermining of traditional values (self-sufficiency, family, democracy, religion and a just economy) recall Vietnam, South Africa and many other countries of the earth. In Germany under the façade of the good and progressive, the social achievements of two hundred years are destroyed with the help of synchronized media, alarmed citizens and disheartened irresponsible politicians.
John Pilger will not stand by and watch and seeks allies. He writes at the end: “The battle has only begun.” |
See also:
http://www.mbtranslations.com
http://www.commondreams.org
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