by John Pilger
None of it was true. In 1986, TV Guide published a cover story entitled ‘Why American TV is So Vulnerable to Foreign Propaganda’, in which it claimed that the Libyan hit team story was really a figment of a KGB campaign to spread alarm and ‘to destabilise public opinion in the West’.121 The admission came shortly after American warplanes had bombed Libyan civilians from British bases. Libya’s ‘crime’ then was a terrorist bombing in Berlin that was later traced to the Assad regime in Syria. In 1990, the same Syrian regime was rewarded with millions of dollars’ worth of arms credits.122 ‘We have problems with their support of terrorism,’ said Secretary of State James Baker, ‘but we share a common goal.’123 The goal was the destruction of Syria’s old foe, Iraq.
That goal is now drawing closer, along with the goal of finishing off the uppity Gaddafi, a perfect hate figure in an election year. The United Nations will provide legitimacy for what are little more than acts of international piracy. As Francis Boyle, the distinguished American authority on international law, has pointed out, the US and Britain have violated both the Montreal Sabotage Convention and the UN Charter. ‘The conclusion is unescapable’, he wrote, ‘that the reason why the US and UK have illegally rejected all means for the peaceful resolution of this dispute with Libya is that both states know full well that Libya was not responsible for the Lockerbie bombing.’124
The ‘new world order’ strategists may, however, come unstuck in Libya. Arab hostility towards American dominance in Middle Eastern affairs has sharpened since the destruction of Iraq. The ripple effect on economic and political life in the region has reinforced fundamentalism, as recent events in Algeria demonstrate. The Arab world has identified the essential hypocrisy of UN pressure on Iraq and Libya. Israel, having repeatedly thumbed its nose at UN resolutions, is under no such pressure.
As for Britain, it is the tenth anniversary of the Falklands War and the British foreign policy establishment is reminding itself of the debt it owes to Washington, without whose satellite intelligence Margaret Thatcher might not have been able to call upon us to ‘rejoice’. However, Britain’s role during the past decade has been more active than that of indebted loyal lieutenant. As John Gittings has pointed out, the British have ‘exalted the values of war over peace, of unilateral settling of scores rather than multilateral negotiations of differences’.125 It was Thatcher who promoted these values more than Reagan or Bush. In accepting cruise missiles in Britain, she single-handedly accelerated the nuclear arms race.
Great power nostalgia and pretensions are always close at hand in Britain. The Conservative election manifesto emphasised the need for Britain ‘to regain . . . rightful influence’ and to ‘lead the world’. Labour wanted to ‘partner’ the United States in reducing nuclear weapons. Instead of calling for a total moratorium on arms sales to the Middle East, Labour wanted to ‘control’ the arms bazaar. Like John Major’s ‘arms register’, this would have merely screened the scandals and corruption of the British arms industry. So the question is put: What is Parliament for?
In supporting the slaughter during the Gulf War – Tory and Labour together – Parliament failed in one of its primary obligations: to represent and articulate the misgivings of a large section of the population. Since then, Parliament has been instrumental in the covering up of a report into Britain’s biggest arms contract with one of the beneficiaries of the war and the principal Western client in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia.
Parliament’s public-spending ‘watchdog’, the Public Accounts Committee, has refused to publish the results of a three-year enquiry into the Saudi deal, which is for British Tornado aircraft worth £20 billion. The chairman, Robert Sheldon, a Labour MP, says that he has spent ‘many hours worrying about this decision, but there really are enormous amounts of jobs at stake’.126 He says that there is ‘no evidence of corruption or of public money being used improperly’.127 If this is true, why can’t the report be released? What are parliamentary committees for if not to shed light on that which officialdom wishes to conceal?
In the case of the Saudi deal, like so much to do with British ‘interests’ in the Gulf, secrecy and stink go together. The National Audit Office, which refused to show its own report to Sheldon’s committee, has found that the Saudi contract was written in such a way that huge ‘commissions’ running into hundreds of millions of pounds may have been paid by British Aerospace to Saudi and British middlemen.128 How does this square with Sheldon’s statement that there is ‘no evidence of corruption’? And is it not true that when the National Audit Office announced that it was to hold an enquiry, the Saudis threatened to pull out of the Tornado deal?129
According to the Observer, Mark Thatcher may have received as much as £10 million from one of the main British Aerospace agents involved in the Saudi deal, which was negotiated while his mother was prime minister.130 He has been named in a civil action in the United States as having helped British Aerospace and Rolls-Royce to win a helicopter defence contract in Saudi Arabia. A confidential memorandum refers to $4 billion ‘mentioned in connection with M. Thatcher’s son’.131 If none of this is in the public interest, what is? Parliament should find out the facts and tell us. That is what it’s for.
April to May 1992
V
WAR BY OTHER MEANS
THE NEW PROPAGANDA
JOHN MAJOR’S SKILFULLY managed tour of the Far East recalls to mind the anonymous radical song circa 1820: ‘What land has not seen Britain’s crimson flying, the meteor of murder, but justice the plea.’ Major’s toasting of Li Peng, the accredited mass murderer, was in keeping both with British imperialist tradition and present-day Western Stalinism. True, Major’s career has been mostly as an apparatchik, although the keenness with which he engaged in the recolonisation of the Middle East and the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqi conscripts and civilians suggested he was made of stronger stuff. His journey to China for the purpose of offering alliance and reassurance to those who ordered the massacre in Tiananmen Square and the crushing of the democracy movement, guarantees his prominent place above the mausoleum of the ‘new world order’.
None of this is surprising. The symbiosis of the actions and endorsements of grey men with bloody repression is well documented. Chamberlain fawned over Hitler; Kissinger unleashed the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on Cambodia; Bush dispatched several thousand Panamanians as the precursor of his ‘famous victory’ in the Gulf. And all were attended by a fellow-travelling media. Major’s Chinese exercise, amoral by any normal standards of human behaviour, was routinely misrepresented as an heroic ‘bullying stand’ on behalf of human rights. That Major’s concern for human rights did not extend to Hong Kong, where he has the power directly to influence policy on democratisation, was not considered important and was widely suppressed. The posturing of the old Soviet Stalinists was celebrated within similar fixed boundaries of public discourse.
Western Stalinism is by far the most insidious variety. In a democracy, manipulation of public perception and opinion is, by necessity, more subtle and thorough than in a tyranny. Major’s China trip is a case in point. Contrary to the managed headlines, its aim was to reassure the Beijing regime that the Western imperialist powers had no intention of disturbing the state of capitalism in Hong Kong by allowing genuine democracy to take root. China, after all, is the paragon of what the dissident Russian writer Boris Kagarlitsky has called ‘market Stalinism’; that is, an economic state in which there are consumer goods in the shop windows, growing unemployment, depleted public services and a totalitarian regime. Even that most inspirational of China’s revolutionary achievements – its system of barefoot doctors – is being swept aside by privatisation drawn from the same Thatcherite model that is undermining the National Health Service in Britain.
The new propaganda differs from the old only in the technology of its conveyance. It says that, following events in the Soviet Union, a market economy and democracy are indivisible and that the unrestrained forces of Western (and Japanese)
capitalism equal freedom and life. This supersedes the Cold War refrain of the Russian Threat, which allowed the United States to construct its economic and strategic empire following 1945.
As Paul Flewers wrote in the Guardian: ‘People really believed that unless they backed their capitalist rulers, Soviet troops would be marching down the street . . . Classic inter-imperialist rivalries which caused two world wars were suppressed, and war was mainly confined to the Third World. Socialism has largely been defined as Stalinism, and consequently capitalism has to a large extent been legitimised.’1
Like my generation, the young today are being subjected to the same old routine in a different guise. The crumbling of Stalinism in the Soviet Union will increasingly be used, as the repressive nature of Stalinism itself was used, as a propaganda weapon against those who seek social change – principally, an end to the scourge of poverty.
This works on two levels. In the tracts exalting the ‘freedoms’ of the market, much is made of the violent history of communism. Nothing is said about the victims of expansionist capitalism. While millions died at the hands of Stalin and his successors within the Soviet Union, millions more were blood sacrifices in wars of imperialist competition. Several million died in a ‘small war’ in Indo-China. The blood-letting of apartheid in South Africa was underwritten by Western capital. In the Middle East, Anglo-American interests demanded the retention of feudalism and the dispossession of a whole people, the Palestinians.
The Soviet Stalinists were never in this league; they were lousy imperialists beyond the sphere of influence that Churchill and Roosevelt granted Stalin at Yalta. The West and Japan, on the other hand, have capital and debt as their levers of control.
Never before in history have the poor financed the rich on such a scale and paid so dearly for their servitude. During the 1980s, the Third World sent to the West $220 billion more than was sent to them in any form.2 At the current rates of interest, it is a mathematical impossibility for most countries to pay off their debt. Many had to agree to ‘structural adjustment’ by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This has often meant the end of uncertain protection for the old, young and sick and ‘wage restraint’ in countries where the difference between wage and peonage is slight.
Debt and ‘market Stalinism’ are to be capitalism’s greeting to the new Soviet Union. Capital will flow at such a pace that the IMF is already having to ‘structurally adjust’ Yeltsin’s democracy. At the weekend I phoned Boris Kagarlitsky in Moscow and asked him about this. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you can invest $1,000 here now and get $10,000 back immediately. And that’s just the exchange rate. We are the new Brazil, just waiting to be Latin Americanised.’
On this side of the Atlantic, the new propaganda concentrates on fortress Europe. The EC is the ‘new world’, with open borders and markets, a hive of prosperous, liberal energy – as long as you can get in. It is a fine illusion, for in the wider world, economic inequality has reached the highest point in human history; during the 1980s the number of countries catching up the industrialised states, in per capita terms, fell by three quarters. In other words, poverty has never risen as fast.3
The truth is quite simple: the rhetoric of Thatcher and Reagan was false, the literal opposite of the truth. Thatcher and her ideologues were brilliant propagandists and social destroyers – as those in Third World Britain and in structurally adjusted Africa, Chile and elsewhere bear silent witness. It is, of course, not necessary to look at the world through such a distorted prism. Socialism was never Stalinism: socialist struggles gave liberal democracy much of its gloss. The ignorant certainties are no less venal today than they ever were, whatever their disguise.
September 15, 1991
THE WAR AGAINST DEMOCRACY
THE WAR AGAINST democracy, which replaced the Cold War, had a notable success in Moscow this week. The promoters of the totalitarian ‘market’ accelerated their assault on the lives of millions with the destruction of the second freely elected parliament in 1,000 years of Russian history. Boris Yeltsin, the former Communist Party boss of Sverdlovsk, a position he used to oppose basic democratic rights, brought troops and tanks into the heart of his Russian ‘democracy’ and allowed them to murder the elected representatives of the people. He could have been a Pinochet or a Somoza. John Major, for his part, said he admired Yeltsin’s ‘restraint’.
The Orwellian cover given these events in the west is astonishing even by the standards of previous propaganda models, such as the Gulf War, in which the slaughter of 200,000 people was dispatched down the media’s memory hole. It would be illuminating to see a comparative study of Pravada’s reporting of the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union and western reporting of Yeltsin’s Russia. The similarities of systematic, ideological distortion would say much about the progaganda that we in the west often call news.
The BBC, ever conscious of its ‘impartiality’, has led the propaganda barrage, constantly referring to Yeltsin’s draconian methods as ‘reforms’ and his parliamentary opponents as ‘hardliners’ and ‘extremists’. Boris the Good, on the other hand, is ‘the democrat whose patience finally snapped’: such a generous description of a man whose troops had just burned the nation’s parliament.4 (Imagine a BBC report from Berlin in 1933, ‘The Reichstag was burned down only after Herr Hitler’s patience snapped.’)
Since Yeltsin discovered ‘democracy’ under Gorbachev, he has played to the western media gallery, whose reporting of his rise has helped to sustain him in power. With his American advisers and with American presidents propping him up, here, after 75 years, was a dictator who could deliver the Russian hinterland to foreign capital.
The necessary media mythology quickly followed. This summer, it has been Yeltsin versus the ‘hardline communist’ parliament. In fact, the parliament was neither undemocratic nor run by so-called hardliners. All the deputies were democratically elected in multi-candidate contests. Like Yeltsin himself, the majority were ex-communists; but most of them were, until recently, Yeltsin supporters. They elected him as the parliament’s first chairman, passed the constitutional amendments that launched his presidency and stood by him during the abortive coup in 1991 when the White House and its parliament were the very symbol of Russian democracy.
‘Far from defending democracy,’ wrote Renfrey Clarke, a Russian specialist not published in Britain, ‘Yeltsin’s coup was launched because democratic institutions were beginning to work. The system of checks and balances was functioning as intended, with the legislature and the judiciary curbing the ability of the president to continue implementing policies that had failed and lost popular support. But instead of accepting that the other branches of government had the right to insist on a change of course, Yeltsin responded as a committed totalitarian.’5
Renfrey Clarke writes for Australia’s Green Left Weekly. Together with another freelance, Fred Weir of the Morning Star, and Jonathan Steele of the Guardian, his reports are rare in a coverage that has served the expectations of Western economic interests – just as the Western press did before and after the 1917 revolution (with the honourable exception of Morgan Philips Price of the Manchester Guardian).
The largely untold truth in the West is that Yeltsin has returned Russia to military Stalinism, that he is the hardliner, and that the blood spilt this week is the direct result of ruthlessly applied ‘market reforms’ – the same ‘reforms’ that have caused so much suffering in Britain. ‘Yeltsin’s policies have met opposition,’ wrote Clarke, ‘not because the Russian parliament is dominated by bloody-minded conservatives – an absurd claim – but because these policies are both contrary to the interests of most Russians and deeply flawed. Few economic programmes have been so ill suited, and few have failed so comprehensively.’6
Under Yeltsin, Russian industrial output has collapsed to 60 per cent of the level of January 1990. Price rises amount to 2,600 per cent. Real per capita incomes have dropped to Third World proportions, placing many Russians, who once enjoyed a ce
rtain social security, on a par with Mexicans. The obsessiveness of Yeltsin’s ‘shock therapy’ – prescribed by Thatcherite advisers using discredited models – has been accompanied by a campaign against pluralism reminiscent of Thatcher.
In decree after decree, Yeltsin has undermined the new democratic institutions. In Decree No. 1400, he suspended the constitutional court, Russia’s third arm of government. When the chairman of the court, Valery Zorkin, challenged the legality of this, his telephone was cut off on the personal order of the president. During the referendum campaign in April 1993, the national television service was hijacked by Yeltsin, then refused all but token airtime to opposition candidates.
This week, he has banned a swathe of opposition parties and newspapers with hardly a word of protest from Washington and London. When the Sandinistas briefly suspended an opposition newspaper, funded by the CIA, the American press made this a cause célèbre. The Sandinistas were not approved by Washington; Yeltsin is. Adding to the Orwellian lexicon, the New York Times describes his thuggery as a ‘democratic coup’.7 He has now drained future elections of democratic substance; the millions who suffer from and oppose his ‘reforms’ will have no one to vote for. His crime, this week, is to have crossed a threshold of violence beyond which lies an abyss well documented in Russian history.
What has happened in Russia is a vivid example of the war against democracy being waged all over the world in the name of the ‘global economy’ and ‘development’, the euphemisms for market imperialism. Of course, a Boris Yeltsin is not always available; and when democratically elected leaders dare to place the interests of their country before those of the rulers of the world, they become the target of economic warfare. This happened in Chile under Salvador Allende, in Jamaica during Michael Manley’s first term and in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. (‘We got rid of the communists in Nicaragua,’ boasted former President Carter recently.)8 When the Guatemalan human-rights activist Ramiro de Leon was elected president last June, he pledged to make his ‘first priority’ the ending of the poverty that afflicts almost 90 per cent of his people. Within a month, the pressure from Washington was such that de Leon bowed to IMF demands for an ‘open market’ and economic austerity for the majority. Had he not complied, he said, his country would have been ‘destabilised’.