[mobglob-discuss] UNTHINKABLE BECOMING NORMAL-PILGER

[Carole Karkhairan]

ZNet | Terror War
 
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.



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