Johnpilger.com<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\nShortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I interviewed Ray McGovern, one of an elite group of CIA officers who prepared the President\u2019s daily intelligence brief. McGovern was at the apex of the \u201cnational security\u201d monolith that is American power and had retired with presidential plaudits. On the eve of the invasion, he and 45 other senior officers of the CIA and other intelligence agencies wrote to President George W. Bush that the \u201cdrumbeat for war\u201d was based not on intelligence, but lies.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was 95 per cent charade,\u201d McGovern told me.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow did they get away with it?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe press allowed the crazies to get away with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWho are the crazies?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe people running the [Bush] administration have a set of beliefs a lot like those expressed in Mein Kampf… these are the same people who were referred to in the circles in which I moved, at the top, as \u2018the crazies\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
I said, \u201cNorman Mailer has written that that he believes America has entered a pre-fascist state. What\u2019s your view of that?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell… I hope he\u2019s right, because there are others saying we are already in a fascist mode.\u201d<\/p>\n
On 22 January, Ray McGovern emailed me to express his disgust at the Obama administration\u2019s barbaric treatment of the alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning and its pursuit of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. \u201cWay back when George and Tony decided it might be fun to attack Iraq,\u201d he wrote, \u201cI said something to the effect that fascism had already begun here. I have to admit I did not think it would get this bad this quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n
On 16 February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech at George Washington University in which she condemned governments that arrested protestors and crushed free expression. She lauded the liberating power of the internet while failing to mention that her government was planning to close down those parts of the internet that encouraged dissent and truth-telling. It was a speech of spectacular hypocrisy, and Ray McGovern was in the audience. Outraged, he rose from his chair and silently turned his back on Clinton. He was immediately seized by police and a security goon and beaten to the floor, dragged out and thrown into jail, bleeding. He has sent me photographs of his injuries. He is 71. During the assault, which was clearly visible to Clinton, she did not pause in her remarks.<\/p>\n
Fascism is a difficult word, because it comes with an iconography that touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda against America\u2019s official enemies and to promote the West\u2019s foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary written in the struggle against Hitler. And yet fascism and imperialism are twins. In the aftermath of world war two, those in the imperial states who had made respectable the racial and cultural superiority of \u201cwestern civilisation\u201d, found that Hitler and fascism had claimed the same, employing strikingly similar methods. Thereafter, the very notion of American imperialism was swept from the textbooks and popular culture of an imperial nation forged on the genocidal conquest of its native people. And a war on social justice and democracy became \u201cUS foreign policy\u201d.<\/p>\n
As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Suharto, Mobutu and Pinochet to dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America. In \u201cOperation Cyclone\u201d, the CIA and MI6 secretly fostered and bank-rolled Islamic extremism. The object was to smash or deter nationalism and democracy. The victims of this western state terrorism have been mostly Muslims. The courageous people gunned down last week in Bahrain and Libya, the latter a \u201cpriority UK market\u201d, according to Britain\u2019s official arms \u201cprocurers\u201d, join those children blown to bits in Gaza by the latest American F-16 aircraft.<\/p>\n
The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator but a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day. The people\u2019s triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.<\/p>\n
How did such extremism take hold in the liberal West? \u201cIt is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for the poor and oppressed,\u201d observed Noam Chomsky a generation ago, \u201c[and] to replace these dangerous feelings with self-centred egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that [an order of] inequities and oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is under way to convince people \u2013 particularly young people \u2013 that this not only is what they should feel but that it\u2019s what they do feel.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun. In the United States, where 45 per cent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, a billion dollars a year, mass protests against cuts in services and jobs have spread to heartland states like Wisconsin. In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest movement, UK Uncut, is about to take direct action against tax avoiders and rapacious banks. Something has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a name now<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From Countercurrents: Behind The Arab Revolt Is A Word We Dare Not Speak By John Pilger 27 February, 2011 Johnpilger.com Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I interviewed Ray McGovern, one of an elite group of CIA officers who prepared the President\u2019s daily intelligence brief. McGovern was at the apex of the \u201cnational […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisp.lautre.net\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisp.lautre.net\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisp.lautre.net\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisp.lautre.net\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisp.lautre.net\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/chrisp.lautre.net\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23,"href":"https:\/\/chrisp.lautre.net\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions\/23"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisp.lautre.net\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisp.lautre.net\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisp.lautre.net\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}