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Welcome to Orwell’s World 2010

John Pilger | 05.01.2010 20:35 | Analysis | Anti-militarism | Other Press | World

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said the “the world” supported the invasion in the wake of 9/11 when, in truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition.



Welcome to Orwell’s World 2010

Inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth"


In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions and diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said the “the world” supported the invasion in the wake of 9/11 when, in truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan “only after the Taliban refused to turn over [Osama] bin Laden”. In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, reported Pakistan’s military regime, and were ignored. Even Obama’s mystification of 9/11 as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, was told by the Bush administration that an American military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as “stable” enough to ensure America’s control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.

Obama’s most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a “safe haven” for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the West. His own national security adviser, General James Jones, said in October that there were “fewer than 100” al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 per cent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but “a tribal localised insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power”. The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of “world peace”.

Beneath the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing General Stanley McCrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of one of the most impoverished countries is a model for those “disorderly regions” of the world still beyond Oceania’s reach. This is a known as COIN, or counter-insurgency network, which draws together the military, aid organisations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, its aim is to pit one ethnic group against another and incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbecks against Pashtuns.

The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They bribed and built walls between communities who had once inter-married, ethnically cleansing the Sunni and driving millions out of the country. The embedded media reported this as “peace”, and American academics bought by Washington and “security experts” briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite was true.

Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into “target areas” controlled by warlords bankrolled by the Americans and the opium trade. That these warlords are infamous for their barbarism is irrelevant. “We can live with that,” a Clinton-era diplomat said of the persecution of women in a “stable” Taliban-run Afghanistan. Favoured western relief agencies, engineers and agricultural specialists will attend to the “humanitarian crisis” and so “secure” the subjugated tribal lands.

That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia where the ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam where the CIA’s “strategic hamlet program” was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Viet Cong -- the Americans’ catch-all term for the resistance, similar to “Taliban”.

Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic-cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance – these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people. And yet for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.

The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his strange general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.

“It was curious,” wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same, everywhere, all over the world … people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same people who … were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”

John Pilger
- Homepage: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24286.htm

Comments

Hide the following 7 comments

Yes they did!

05.01.2010 22:12

Yes they did! The UN, under Resolution 1386 (2001), did authorise a security force for Afghanistan in 2001. John Pilger has bizarrely, retrospectively and unilaterally, reinterpreted that as a 'US attack'.

G. Bush


nitpicking

06.01.2010 00:00

If the UN were to have been told that the US would still be there 9 years later with the pipeline still not built, Taliban running amock and Osama Bin Laden still not found, they would have said to the whole world "the US has gone insane, they are threatening our members with violence if we do not comply with them".

And so was born the War on Terror, the Financial Crisis, the collapse of true democracy and, oh yes, mustnt forget...globalisation!

The US, the UK and Israel. A triptych of evil if ever there was one.

I like John Pilger, he got balls the size of space-hoppers.

polaks


Deliberate distortion of the facts

06.01.2010 08:24

So, "There was no UN authority."
And "...all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition..."

Well, well...
The following citation is from you_know_where: "Operating under U.S. Army General Stanley A. McChrystal who commands all coalition forces in Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) includes soldiers from 42 countries with U.S. troops making up about half its force.[2] ISAF had initially been established as a stabilization force by the United Nations Security Council on December 20, 2001...
... ISAF is mandated by the United Nations Security Council Resolutions S/RES/1386, S/RES/1413, S/RES/1444, S/RES/1510, S/RES/1563, S/RES/1623, S/RES/1659, S/RES/1707, and S/RES/1776(2007)"

Evidently, 42 countries and 9 UNSC resolutions are nothing for someone named John Pilger...

Israel


Institutional Bollocks

06.01.2010 13:21

Why people who are meant to be on the left of politics even acknowledge the validity of institutions (especially the UN) is beyond me.

The UN has continuously demonstrated it's uselessness, most recently in the Kosovo affair of 99 and Iraq in 2003 as well as in its inability to enforce any of its resolutions for 'combatting' the decades of Israeli aggression in Palestine.

So whether the UN passed a resolution on Afghanistan or not it's the same fucking difference. A lame duck organization passing a resolution accepting the mass murder of a country's population should never be validated by the left.

Remember it's about social justice and humanity, not about institutions...especially those controlled by imperialist nations and their rogue governments throughout the world.

T


1984 comments

06.01.2010 13:54

The United Nations have never authorised the so called security forces to maim and kill innocent civilians in their own country I have no doubt that commenters like Israel
are probably working for the same psychopaths who are doing the killing, such a shame that an otherwise excellent article like this becomes subject to the vicious misleading and evidently false accusations of innacuracy it does not contain... and this sort of commentry fools no one, most decent people are appalled by the illegal invasion and plunder of Afghanistan and Iraq by, for and principally the US and Britain with a little help from their so called allies in this Israel and Australia

buggerallmoney


selectivity

07.01.2010 10:32

"The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They bribed and built walls between communities who had once inter-married, ethnically cleansing the Sunni"

A land of milk and honey it was, with all communities treated equally under the benevolent Uncle Saddam....

Good old Pilchard.

sappht


To punish Brazilian Torturers

08.01.2010 17:41

Conflito ou Complementação?

Em entrevista à Agência Brasil, Jobim, na tentativa de garantir a impunidade dos torturadores do regime militar, disse: "Dizem que os tratados internacionais consideram alguns crimes imprescritíveis. Mas no Brasil não é assim. Os tratados internacionais aqui não valem mais que a Constituição. Eles estão sujeitos à Constituição brasileira, que dá imprescritibilidade para um crime só: o de racismo. Trata-se de uma questão legal."
Em primeiro lugar, a Constituição vigente também estabelece que a ação de grupos armados, civis ou militares, contra a ordem constitucional e o Estado Democrático também constitui crime inafiançável e imprescritível. Em segundo lugar, se o Brasil é signatário de um tratado que considera imprescritível o crime de tortura, então no Brasil é assim. Não há essa falsa polêmica posta por Jobim entre hierarquia das normas jurídicas (Tratado Internacional versus Constituição).

Sustentar que há conflito entre um Tratado Internacional, que considera imprescritível o crime de tortura, e a Constituição, que estabelece como imprescritíveis apenas os crime de racismo e os de grupos armados, civis ou militares, contra a ordem constitucional e o Estado Democrático, equivale a ver antinomia entre o Código Penal, que criminaliza o homicídio, e a Constituição, que não declara, expressamente, que o homicídio é crime.
Não há conflito, mas complementação, entre o Tratado Internacional que considera o crime de tortura imprescritível e a Constituição, que estabelece como imprescritíveis os crimes de racismo e de grupos armados, civis ou militares, contra a ordem constitucional e o Estado Democrático. Consta no parágrafo 2º da Constituição Federal que “os direitos e garantias expressos nesta Constituição não excluem outros decorrentes do regime e dos princípios por ela adotados, ou dos tratados internacionais em que a República Federativa do Brasil seja parte.” Só haveria conflito entre o referido Tratado Internacional e a Constituição Federal se aquele estabelecesse, por exemplo, que os crimes de racismo ou de grupos armados, civis ou militares, contra a ordem constitucional e o Estado Democrático seriam prescritíveis. Não há antinomia entre a Constituição Federal e o referido Tratado Internacional. O conflito que existe é entre o clamor nacional para acabar com a impunidade e a reação dos torturadores e dos seus escudeiros no sentido de garantir a impunidade dos torturadores.

Existe conflito, por exemplo, entre o Tratado Internacional que não permite a prisão civil do depositário infiel e a Constituição que prevê a prisão civil do alimentante e do depositário infiel. E, mesmo nesse caso, o referido tratado, teve aplicabilidade em detrimento da Constituição.

Quando o tratado é mais protetivo (que o direito interno), a validade da norma internacional é indiscutível (porque ela está complementando a CF , especificando um direito ou garantia ou ampliando o seu exercício). Nesse sentido : RHC 79.785 , rel. Min. Sepúlveda Pertence (assim como voto do Min. Celso de Mello no RE 466.343-SP e no HC 87.585-TO) . Todas as normas internacionais que especificam ou ampliam o exercício de um direito ou garantia constitucional passam a compor (de acordo com a visão do Min. Celso de Mello) o chamado "bloco de constitucionalidade" (que é a somatória daquilo que se adiciona à Constituição , em razão dos seus valores e princípios). --- Jobim quer conservar as coisas mudando-lhes os nomes. Punição=revanchismo.

Mannish Boy


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