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The
Unthinkable is Becoming Normal
by
John Pilger
April
21, 2003
Last
Sunday, seated in the audience at the Bafta television awards ceremony, I was
struck by the silence. Here were many of the most influential members of the
liberal elite, the writers, producers, dramatists, journalists and managers of
our main source of information, television; and not one broke the silence. It
was as though we were disconnected from the world outside: a world of rampant,
rapacious power and great crimes committed in our name by our government and
its foreign master. Iraq is the "test case", says the Bush regime,
which every day sails closer to Mussolini's definition of fascism: the merger
of a militarist state with corporate power. Iraq is a test case for western
liberals, too. As the suffering mounts in that stricken country, with Red Cross
doctors describing "incredible'' levels of civilian casualties, the choice
of the next conquest, Syria or Iran, is "debated'' on the BBC, as if it
were a World Cup venue.
The
unthinkable is being normalised. The American essayist Edward Herman wrote:
"There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the
unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of
individuals ... others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas,
a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh
in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the
mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public.''
Herman
wrote that following the 1991 Gulf War, whose nocturnal images of American
bulldozers burying thousands of teenage Iraqi conscripts, many of them alive
and trying to surrender, were never shown. Thus, the slaughter was normalised.
A study released just before Christmas 1991 by the Medical Educational Trust
revealed that more 200,000 Iraqi men, women and children were killed or died as
a direct result of the American-led attack. This was barely reported, and the
homicidal nature of the "war'' never entered public consciousness in this
country, let alone America.
The
Pentagon's deliberate destruction of Iraq's civilian infrastructure, such as
power sources and water and sewage plants, together with the imposition of an
embargo as barbaric as a medieval siege, produced a degree of suffering never
fully comprehended in the West. Documented evidence was available, volumes of
it; by the late 1990s, more than 6,000 infants were dying every month, and the
two senior United Nations officials responsible for humanitarian relief in
Iraq, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned, protesting the embargo's
hidden agenda. Halliday called it "genocide".
As
of last July, the United States, backed by the Blair government, was wilfully
blocking humanitarian supplies worth $5.4bn, everything from vaccines and
plasma bags to simple painkillers, all of which Iraq had paid for and the
Security Council had approved.
Last
month's attack by the two greatest military powers on a demoralised, sick and
largely defenceless population was the logical extension of this barbarism.
This is now called a "victory", and the flags are coming out. Last
week, the submarine HMS Turbulent returned to Plymouth, flying the Jolly Roger,
the pirates' emblem. How appropriate. This nuclear-powered machine fired some
30 American Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraq. Each missile cost £700,000: a
total of £21m. That alone would provide desperate Basra with food, water and
medicines.
Imagine:
what did Commander Andrew McKendrick's 30 missiles hit? How many people did
they kill or maim in a population nearly half of which are children? Maybe,
Commander, you targeted a palace with gold taps in the bathroom, or a
"command and control facility", as the Americans and Geoffrey Hoon
like to lie. Or perhaps each of your missiles had a sensory device that could distinguish
George Bush's "evil-doers'' from toddlers. What is certain is that your
targets did not include the Ministry of Oil.
When
the invasion began, the British public was called upon to "support''
troops sent illegally and undemocratically to kill people with whom we had no
quarrel. "The ultimate test of our professionalism'' is how Commander
McKendrick describes an unprovoked attack on a nation with no submarines, no
navy and no air force, and now with no clean water and no electricity and, in
many hospitals, no anaesthetic with which to amputate small limbs shredded by
shrapnel. I have seen elsewhere how this is done, with a gag in the patient's
mouth.
One
child, Ali Ismaeel Abbas, the boy who lost his parents and his arms in a
missile attack, has been flown to a modern hospital in Kuwait. Publicity has
saved him. Tony Blair says he will "do everything he can'' to help him.
This must be the ultimate insult to the memory of all the children of Iraq who
have died violently in Blair's war, and as a result of the embargo that Blair
enthusiastically endorsed. The saving of Ali substitutes a media spectacle of
charity for our right to knowledge of the extent of the crime committed against
the young in our name. Let us now see the pictures of the "truckload of dozens
of dismembered women and children'' that the Red Cross doctors saw.
As
Ali was flown to Kuwait, the Americans were preventing Save The Children from
sending a plane with medical supplies into northern Iraq, where 40,000 are
desperate. According to the UN, half the population of Iraq has only enough
food to last a few weeks. The head of the World Food Programme says that 40
million people around the world are now seriously at risk because of the
distraction of the humanitarian disaster in Iraq.
And
this is "liberation"? No, it is bloody conquest, witnessed by
America's mass theft of Iraq's resources and natural wealth. Ask the crowds in
the streets, for whom the fear and hatred of Saddam Hussein have been
transferred, virtually overnight, to Bush and Blair and perhaps to "us''.
Such
is the magnitude of Blair's folly and crime that the contrivance of his
vindication is urgent. As if speaking for the vindicators, Andrew Marr, the
BBC's political editor, reported: "[Blair] said they would be able to take
Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be
celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively
right.''
What
constitutes a bloodbath to the BBC's man in Downing Street? Did the murder of
the 3,000 people in New York's Twin Towers qualify? If his answer is yes, then
the thousands killed in Iraq during the past month is a bloodbath. One report
says that more than 3,000 Iraqis were killed within 24 hours or less. Or are
the vindicators saying that the lives of one set of human beings have less
value than those recognisable to us? Devaluation of human life has always been
essential to the pursuit of imperial power, from the Congo to Vietnam, from
Chechnya to Iraq.
If,
as Milan Kundera wrote, "the struggle of people against power is the
struggle of memory against forgetting", then we must not forget. We must
not forget Blair's lies about weapons of mass destruction which, as Hans Blix
now says, were based on "fabricated evidence". We must not forget his
callous attempts to deny that an American missile killed 62 people in a Baghdad
market. And we must not forget the reason for the bloodbath. Last September, in
announcing its National Security Strategy, Bush served notice that America
intended to dominate the world by force. Iraq was indeed the "test
case". The rest was a charade.
We
must not forget that a British defence secretary has announced, for the first
time, that his government is prepared to launch an attack with nuclear weapons.
He echoes Bush, of course. An ascendant mafia now rules the United States, and
the Prime Minister is in thrall to it. Together, they empty noble words –
liberation, freedom and democracy – of their true meaning. The unspoken truth
is that behind the bloody conquest of Iraq is the conquest of us all: of our
minds, our humanity and our self-respect at the very least. If we say and do
nothing, victory over us is assured.
John Pilger is a renowned investigative
journalist and documentary filmmaker. His latest book is The New Rulers of
the World (Verso, 2002). Visit John Pilger’s website at: http://www.johnpilger.com