by John Pilger
A virulent if familiar
censorship is about to descend on the US election campaign. As the cartoon
brute, Donald Trump, seems almost certain to win the Republican Party’s
nomination, Hillary Clinton is being ordained both as the “women’s candidate”
and the champion of American liberalism in its heroic struggle with the Evil
One.
This is drivel, of course;
Hillary Clinton leaves a trail of blood and suffering around the world and a
clear record of exploitation and greed in her own country. To say so, however,
is becoming intolerable in the land of free speech.
The 2008 presidential campaign
of Barack Obama should have alerted even the most dewy-eyed. Obama based his
“hope” campaign almost entirely on the fact of an African-American aspiring to
lead the land of slavery. He was also “antiwar”.
Obama was never antiwar. On
the contrary, like all American presidents, he was pro-war. He had voted for
George W. Bush’s funding of the slaughter in Iraq and he was planning to
escalate the invasion of Afghanistan. In the weeks before he took the
presidential oath, he secretly approved an Israeli assault on Gaza, the
massacre known as Operation Cast Lead. He promised to close the concentration
camp at Guantanamo and did not. He pledged to help make the world “free from
nuclear weapons” and did the opposite.
As a new kind of marketing
manager for the status quo, the unctuous Obama was an inspired choice. Even at
the end of his blood-spattered presidency, with his signature drones spreading
infinitely more terror and death around the world than that ignited by
jihadists in Paris and Brussels, Obama is fawned on as “cool” (the Guardian).
On March 23, CounterPunch
published my article, “A World War has Begun: Break the Silence”. As has
been my practice for years, I then syndicated the piece across an international
network, including Truthout.com, the liberal
American website. Truthout publishes some important journalism, not least
Dahr Jamail’s outstanding corporate exposes.
Truthout rejected the piece
because, said an editor, it had appeared on CounterPunch and had broken
“guidelines”. I replied that this had never been a problem over many
years and I knew of no guidelines.
My recalcitrance was then
given another meaning. The article was reprieved provided I submitted to a
“review” and agreed to changes and deletions made by Truthout’s “editorial
committee”. The result was the softening and censoring of my criticism of
Hillary Clinton, and the distancing of her from Trump. The following was cut:
Trump is a media hate figure.
That alone should arouse our scepticism. Trump’s views on migration are
grotesque, but no more grotesque than David Cameron. It is not Trump
who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace
Prize winner Barack Obama … The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but
Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and
violence of a system … As presidential election day draws near, Clinton
will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and
lies– just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and
liberals swallowed his nonsense about “hope”.
The “editorial committee”
clearly wanted me to water down my argument that Clinton represented a proven extreme
danger to the world. Like all censorship, this was unacceptable. Maya
Schenwar, who runs Truthout, wrote to me that my unwillingness to submit my
work to a “process of revision” meant she had to take it off her “publication
docket”. Such is the gatekeeper’s way with words.
At the root of this episode is
an enduring unsayable. This is the need, the compulsion, of many liberals in
the United States to embrace a leader from within a system that is demonstrably
imperial and violent. Like Obama’s “hope”, Clinton’s gender is no more than a
suitable facade.
This is an historical urge. In
his 1859 essay “On Liberty,” to which modern liberals seem to pay unflagging
homage, John Stuart Mill described the power of empire. “Despotism is a
legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,” he wrote, “provided
the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting
that end.” The “barbarians” were large sections of humanity of whom “implicit
obedience” was required.
“It’s a nice and convenient
myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers,”
wrote the British historian Hywel Williams in 2001, “but the imperialism of the
liberal way may be more dangerous because of its open ended nature – its
conviction that it represents a superior form of life [while denying its] self
righteous fanaticism.” He had in mind a speech by Tony Blair in the aftermath
of the 9/11 attacks, in which Blair promised to “reorder this world around us”
according to his “moral values”. The carnage of a million dead in Iraq was the
result.
Blair’s crimes are not
unusual. Since 1945, some 69 countries — more than a third of the membership of
the United Nations – have suffered some or all of the following. They have been
invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed,
their elections subverted and their people bombed. The historian Mark Curtis
estimates the death toll in the millions. With the demise of the European
empires, this has been the project of the liberal flame carrier, the
“exceptional” United States, whose celebrated “progressive” president, John F
Kennedy, according to new research, authorised the bombing of Moscow during the
Cuban crisis in 1962.
“If we have to use force,”
said Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state in the liberal administration of
Bill Clinton and today a passionate campaigner for his wife, “it is because we
are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further
into the future.”
One of Hillary Clinton’s most
searing crimes was the destruction of Libya in 2011. At her urging, and with
American logistical support, NATO, launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya,
according to its own records, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian
targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. See the photographs of
the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red
Cross. Read the UNICEF report on the children killed, “most [of them] under the
age of ten”.
In Anglo-American scholarship,
followed slavishly by the liberal media on both sides of the Atlantic,
influential theorists known as “liberal realists” have long taught that liberal
imperialists – a term they never use – are the world’s peace brokers and crisis
managers, rather than the cause of a crisis. They have taken the humanity out
of the study of nations and congealed it with a jargon that serves warmongering
power. Laying out whole nations for autopsy, they have identified “failed
states” (nations difficult to exploit) and “rogue states” (nations resistant to
western dominance).
Whether or not the targeted
regime is a democracy or dictatorship is irrelevant. In the Middle East,
western liberalism’s collaborators have long been extremist Islamists, lately
al-Qaeda, while cynical notions of democracy and human rights serve as
rhetorical cover for conquest and mayhem — as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya,
Syria, Yemen, Haiti, Honduras. See the record of those good liberals Bill and
Hillary Clinton. Theirs is a standard to which Trump can only aspire.
[…]
