19 January 2012
by John Pilger
Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely
intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a
presence. She was the embodiment of people's resistance to the war on
democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about
the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa
and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving
villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of
natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her
and her teenage friends, "Keep smiling girls!"
Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, "I
didn't have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots
were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born
there; I made six children there. That's why they couldn't legally
throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or
force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped
arriving [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they
turned on our dogs."
In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly
agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a
British colony, be "swept" and "sanitised" of its 2,500 inhabitants so
that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego
Garcia. "They knew we were inseparable from our pets," said Lizette,
"When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed
their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts;
hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then
they gassed them through tubes from the trucks' exhausts. You could
hear them crying."
Lisette and her family and hundreds of islanders were forced on to a
rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a distance of 2,500 miles. They
were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser: bird shit.
The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two women miscarried. Dumped
on the docks at Port Louis, Lizette's youngest children, Jollice, and
Regis, died within a week of each other. "They died of sadness," she
said. "They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had
happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home forever.
The doctor in Mauritius said he could not treat sadness."
This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one
official file, under the heading, "Maintaining the fiction", the
Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their
actions by "re-classifying" the population as "floating" and to "make
up the rules as we go along". Article 7 of the statute of the
International Criminal Court says the "deportation or forcible transfer
of population" is a crime against humanity. That Britain had committed
such a crime -- in exchange for a $14million discount off an American
Polaris nuclear submarine - was not on the agenda of a group of British
"defence" correspondents flown to the Chagos by the Ministry of Defence
when the US base was completed. "There is nothing in our files," said a
ministry official, "about inhabitants or an evacuation."
Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America's and Britain's war on
democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched
from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders' abandoned cemetery
and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where
Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the
"bunker-busting" bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets in
two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete
the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style
prison for its "rendition" victims and called it Camp Justice.
What was done to Lisette's paradise has an urgent and universal
meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole
system behind its democratic facade, and the scale of our own
indoctrination to its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter
as a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis." Longer
and bloodier than any war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a
gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as
globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite
circles. As Pinter wrote, "it never happened even while it was
happening". Last July, American historian William Blum published his
"updated summary of the record of US foreign policy". Since the Second
World War, the US has:
- Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically-elected.
- Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
- Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
- Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
- Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these
actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a
collaborator. The "enemy" changes in name - from communism to Islamism
-- but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power
or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed
expendable, like the Chagos Islands.
The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known
in the west, despite the presence of the world's most advanced
communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy.
That the most numerous victims of terrorism - western terrorism - are
Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants
died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and
America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11,
was nurtured as a weapon of western policy ("Operation Cyclone") is
known to specialists but otherwise suppressed.
While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second
World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising
from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to
oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed "our man" by
Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the
CIA as "the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century",
the estimate does not include a third of the population of East Timor
who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British
fighter-bombers and machine guns.
These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public
Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the
exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been
achieved by a regime of un-coercive information control, from the
evangelical mantra of consumer advertising to sound-bites on BBC news
and now the ephemera of social media.
It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a
sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped.
Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens,
a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious
power. "For almost the first time in two centuries", wrote Terry
Eagleton, "there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist
prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life". No
Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to
be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no
Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that "disobedience, in the
eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue". And
grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in American Football:
Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things...
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust...
Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack
Obama, the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama's
drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of
Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers in front of
their computer-game screens type in "Bugsplat". Obama likes drones and
has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as
president was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks on Pakistan
that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians;
drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of
children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.
Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected:
"momentous, spine-tingling": the Guardian. "The American future," wrote
Simon Schama, "is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed ..."
The San Francisco Chronicle's columnist saw a spiritual "lightworker
[who can] usher in a new way of being on the planet". Beyond the
drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a
military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man.
Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given
America's corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state
and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and
opportunities for provocations against China, America's largest
creditor and new "enemy" in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of
official paranoia Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles
and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination
teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long planned attacks on
Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence
and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of
$3bn together with Obama's permission to steal more Palestinian land.
Obama's most "historic" achievement is to bring the war on democracy
home to America. On New Year's Eve, he signed the National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the Pentagon the legal
right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely
detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only
"associate" with those "belligerent" to the United States. There will
be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the
first explicit legislation to abolish habeus corpus (the right to due
process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.
On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said
the military would not only be ready to "secure territory and
populations" overseas but to fight in the "homeland" and provide
"support to the civil authorities". In other words, US troops will be
deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil
unrest takes hold.
America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the
consequence of a "market" extremism which, under Obama, has prompted
the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in
Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless,
incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president.
The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism,
not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form,
regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until
November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will
"feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views
of the economy". This is patently false. The circumscribed task of
journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of
political choice where there is none.
The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe where social
democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the
central bank dictators. In David Cameron's "big society", the theft of
84bn pounds in jobs and services even exceeds the amount of tax
"legally" avoid by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far
right, but a cowardly liberal political culture that has allowed this
to happen, which, wrote Hywel Williams in the wake of the attacks on
9/11, "can itself be a form of self righteous fanaticism". Tony Blair
is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms
that it claims to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain has created a
surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than
for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they
have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of
Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for
five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in
Britain "in order to protect the intelligence agencies" - the torturers.
This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the
Chagos islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded
justice in the streets of Port Louis and London. "Only when you take
direct action, face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed,"
said Lisette. "And the smaller you are, the greater your example to
others." Such an eloquent answer to those who still ask, "What can I
do?"
I last saw Lisette's tiny figure standing in driving rain alongside
her comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the
enduring courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up
that rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the
snow.
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