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Distant Voices

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"Who sold weapons to who?" These and other interesting questions are explored in Pilger's essays

The short answers are "we did" and "to Saddam". "Modern" Iraq begins with the coming to power of the Ba'athists with Washington's help in a cruel and bloody episode which "extinguished all hope of a pluralist Iraq" (Pilger). Saddam Hussein was famous then as a torturer at a place known as "The Palace of the End". He and others in his party courted favour with the CIA and together they oversaw the slaughter of Iraq's opposition (teachers, artists, writers, trade unionists, journalists).

In the 80's Britain and the US sold many tons of weaponry to Iraq, and even following Iraq's genocidal gassing of the Kurds in 1988, Britain granted Iraq over $500 million in British trade credit.

"Like other American-sponsored tyrants before him - Diem in Vietnam, Noriega in Panama - Saddam Hussein outlived his usefulness, especially when he had the temerity to challenge our divine right to the resources of the Gulf. For this principle many thousands of people got zapped" (John Pilger).

"Our position should be the protection of the oil fields. Now Whether Kuwait gets put back, that's subsidiary stuff." Said Les Aspen with an unusually firm grasp on the facts of the case as the war was just picking up.

Much of this recent history (and more!) can be found in John Pilger's book "Distant Voices" published by Vintage in 1992. Pilger is a top Journalist, winner of numerous awards (Emmy, Adademy Award, Journalist of the year, etc etc), a fine writer, and a humanitarian.

The next time some maniac decides to lob explosives (or worse) in the vicinity of Times Square or Piccadilly Circus it will behove our leaders and ourselves to consider: "What has driven them to this?" Will it be the sanctions or the bombs themselves? Or will it be the smug and self-satisfied way in which we speak of our freedom and our principles while remaining loyal and patriotic to the evil carried out with our consent?

Pilger explores these questions and more...

During my 7th grade history lesson on the evils committed during W.W.II, I often wondered how modern, well educated, Christian Germans had en masse become such monsters. Well I now know the recipe for the evil madness that consumed the Germans. It consumed America more than once - during the Salem trials, and the McCarthy inquisitions. ___

My own Recipe for evil follies:

"Begin with a healthy ignorance of the 'enemy' and add a pinch of fear." This fear could be economic but a fear of "weapons of mass destruction" will certainly be sufficient. "Drugs" have replaced Satan and Stalin as one of our chief fears during this enlightened time.

"Follow on quickly to cull any dissenters by calling them sympathisers and unpatriotic, and by questioning their integrity and intelligence." The mass of patriots will naturally assist this process.

A modern addition to this recipe and the piece de resistance is "Limit access to information which might make the enemy seem human." If the soldiers are able to kill without having to see the enemy... even better.

___

Folks, the news is historical fiction and the truth is always murky.

The human condition to want food, shelter, and a fair chance for our children drives all of us - American, British and Iraqi - towards ghastly hatred and murder of our fellow humans. The human condition is to want to survive, to propagate our genes, to see our children survive and prosper, to love and be loved. Our fear of drugs, our hatred of Saddam, of Stalin, of witches, our distrust of Arabs or Blacks or Jews, is easily combined with ignorance to convince us of malice and threat to our human wants. And we must Act to crush the threat to avoid the malice. Even when the threat is perceived but not real.

Saddam knows this trick as well as Bush, Blair, Kissenger, and Clinton know it. Our ignorance of the enemy, our fear, and our willingness to ignore the truth allows us the luxury of hatred and righteous justification for whatever evil our country doith in or name.

Evil? Certainly.

"Do to others as you would have them do to you." This is absolute truth in defence of the human condition. The Iraqi people do obviously care that their children are sick and starving. Who will they blame? Saddam? Hardly. Who will we blame should someone decide to gas a few of our children as we welcome the new year? Clinton, Bush, the CIA? Don't bet on it.

That is my own humble reading of Pilger's book (and the message I extracted) as succinctly as I can put it.

Shame it is out of print....

Thomas

DISTANT VOICES BY JOHN PILGER

Journalism at its worst is froth and bubble, at its best it is a dissection of the truth and in the hands of John Pilger, it is definitely the latter. A skilled word smith, he has long been recognized as a 'voice in the wilderness.' His articles and essays as paraphrased in Distant Voices are a cry for reason amidst a world of chaos. The current crisis in East Timor receives ample coverage in Pilger's book, as does the other side of the Gulf War where he redefines the term 'surgical strike' and 'carpet bombing.' The Cambodian crisis of the eighties is exposed as a giant sham and the heartache of Bosnia is laid out for us in black and white.

Not content with hot zones, he has also exposed the New Elite of his own world, the powerful media magnates who control the flow of information to the global community. The New Britain of the nineties had its roots in the Thatcherism as unveiled in Distant Voices. But amongst the doom and gloom he is able to season it with bursts of black hearted comedy and satirical exposes of our sacred cows; Disney comes off second best.

When information is power and controlled by an elite oligarchy, Pilger is one of those who seeks to give power back to the people, as they cry with distant voices.

Written by Alastair Rosie

Is this book out of print. It seems to be available in bookshops here in Ireland.

March 2000

It's almost this book's 20th anniversary. Let's check it out. These are reprinted journalistic articles, typically four or five pages long. They're grouped in 9 chapters: roughly, UK, Gulf, Cambodia, Russia, small countries (Nicaragua, Israel), Australia, and tributes to, among others, Chomsky and Oliver Stone. They're published by Vintage, at a time when they'd started publishing Chomsky as mainstream. I'll try to summarise his stance and also, in my opinion, the vital material omitted.

[1] This is all PC material, at least as regards USA/Canada, Europe, ANZ. It's worth recalling the Stephen Lawrence enquiry, virtually a show trial of the British police, was a little later than these pieces. It would be ten years before Labour in UK would secretly decide to flood immigrants into Britain. The European Union still appears in the index as 'EC', European Community - the secret Soviet-style arrangements were unknown outside a few alarmist circles.

[2] John Pilger had a standard quasi-left stance on, I think, every single issue which was permitted to be aired. For example: he states the 'rich countries' received enormous sums from the poor countries. In fact, of course, it was bankers; it was hardly democratic in any sense. He describes Filipino poverty - Indian slum style poverty of labourers, while Imelda Marcos and her mates lived in enclaves with golf courses. What he doesn't say is what could be done - a handful of houses wouldn't go far divided among millions of people. There's an analogous passage about a coal mine in Britain: a long way underground, and with a small coal seam - but what else could they do? That was where the coal was. He mentions south Africa hardly at all but when he does he disapproves.

[3] His material has endnotes listing sources; mostly these are newspapers, and these are mostly British, though there also books, and journalistic sources such as summary of BBC shortwave transmissions. He also quotes organisations like the 'Runnymede Trust' - part of the huge mass of quangoes and think-tanks with their own agenda. One of the odd aspects of John Pilger's work is that, although he's perfectly aware of censorship and institutional lies, he treats such sources as though they are largely above reproach. As examples, Whittam-Smith who founded the Independent, worked for the Guardian, which in its entire history published nothing honest about the Vietnam War. And yet both these 'newspapers' are quoted with apparent approval by Pilger. One of the noteworthy things about British journalists is their general ignorance - they know nothing of any technical subject. I don't know of a single issue (AIDS? OPs? Lead in petrol? Weapons that don't work? International law? Kennedy murder? EU? Lawyers directing money to each other? War crimes? etc etc) in which journalists and broadcasters have any sort of creditable record.

[4] Pilger misunderstands the entire period since 1914. Under Stalin, tens of millions were murdered; and he was an ally! The systematic bombing of towns in Germany and Japan was deliberate policy; in point of fact, carpet bombing in Korea and Vietnam was the same policy. The most powerful parts of Pilger's writing are to do with genocide in Vietnam, which he partly witnessed; he seems to have little idea about the Second World War. He continues in a similar vein on Iraq and Kuwait and Saddam Hussein, which war was in full swing at the time he wrote these essays. Incidentally he mentions Ramsey Clark's War Crimes Commission, which I think must have been based on Bertrand Russell's. Pilger has no idea about 'Zionists' in the US government; he claims to regard Israel as an apartheid-type state, so this may be a genuine stance. He realises there are at least two types of Muslims, but his tribalist knowledge seems almost non-existent - for instance in Indonesia. I think this helps explain the problematical quality of his writing. Cambodia for instance was bombed by Americans and subsequently largely wiped out, but the underlying uncaring tribal racism of the US controllers is simply not part of Pilger's worldview.

Stylistic note: he seems to have learnt (from some journalism school?) to put in impressionist exaggerations. A coal miner reaches with a 'claw' - the impression given is many miners had lost fingers. There's an account - and I remember a speech by him on this - of a house with Asians in it being attacked by whites. I believe this account is a lie, or at least misleading.

Conclusion: Pilger is an almost perfect example of the house radical, tolerated provided of course the unspoken limits are accepted. He would certainly never have been published or broadcast otherwise. Unfortunately, I don't think his work is any help whatever in deciding what ought to be done.