So, I gave a little speech about art, and war. The Internationale Agentur für Freiheit, a Berlin art and cultural association, asked me to do that to open their exhibition, Make Art Not War. I couldn’t turn them down.
As my readers may have noticed, I haven’t had very much to say about “The War on Hamas,” or “The War on Gaza,” or “The Liquidation of Gaza,” or whatever you want to call it. (It doesn’t look like much of a “war” to me, but then, nothing really has for quite a while.)
I wrote about it in October and November of last year. And I said a few things about it in my speech. But, mostly, I’ve been trying to keep my mouth shut. I don’t have much to contribute to the … well, I can’t really call it a discussion, or debate, or an argument. It feels like people screaming slogans into each other’s faces, accusing each other of this and that, and calling each other names, and so on. Which … I get why people are inclined to do that. I’m not. But I get why other folks are. So, I think it’s best if I just shut my pie hole (as much as possible) and let folks do that.
It isn’t going to change what’s happening. GloboCap (or whatever you call the system we’re all living under) has been occupying, destabilizing, and restructuring the Middle East for decades. It’s not going to stop. It is going to continue. As the restructuring of the West is going to continue.
GloboCap doesn’t have anything else to do.
Anyway, before I ramble on any further, here’s the English version of the speech I gave at the exhibition. Many thanks to those of you who attended … and apologies again for my German. I’ll get the hang of it one of these days.
Fighting Monsters
The name of this exhibition is “Make Art not War.” So I’m going to say a few things about art, and war. You’re not going to like all of them. Or at least I hope not. If you did, I wouldn’t be a very good artist, but I might be a pretty good propagandist.
I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. In the USA. The war was on television. In Vietnam. Cambodia. Cuba. The Middle East. Then in El Salvador. Nicaragua. Iran. Libya. Yugoslavia. Afghanistan. Iraq. The list goes on and on. I am almost 63 years old. All my life we’ve been at war. Not just Americans. All of us. People. Someone always at war with someone. And all my life there have been other people calling for peace. Protesting the war. Whatever war it was at the time.
If you read a little history, as I like to do sometimes, you will learn that someone has been at war with someone over something since the dawn of civilization. Certainly Western civilization. The history of Western art and literature begins with war. Genocidal war. The Illiad is a poem about a genocidal war. Rape. Mass murder. The slaughter of children. Most of Shakespeare’s plays are about war, or are set during a war, or have something to do with someone killing someone over something.
Some of that history happened right here. There are bunkers below us where people sheltered during the bombing raids in the Second World War. Legend has it the Stasi operated listening stations right here in these rooms. When I first arrived in Berlin, twenty years ago, I lived in a sublet on this street. This was my neighborhood, the Bötzowviertel. There were still bullet holes in the facades of buildings. People died here. Civilians. Children. Women were raped here. Families were dragged out of their homes and sent to the death camps here. This is Berlin. You know the history. I don’t need to recite all the details.
What’s my point? Well, my point is ... that is war. Indiscriminate killing. Rape. Mass atrocities. That’s what war is. That is what it has always been. And we’ve been doing it to each other since the dawn of civilization. It is not going to stop. We are not going to stop it. Art is certainly not going to stop it. We are, whether we like it or not, a violent species, human beings. It isn’t all we are, but it is part of what we are. We are also lovers, teachers, healers, artists, and other beautiful things. But sometimes we are vicious killers. Monsters. Genocidal monsters.
A crazy old German philosopher once warned us, “beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” He was joking, of course. There are no monsters. Or, rather, there are only monsters, on every side of every war. In a war, there are no good guys and bad guys. There is just our side and the other side. Our atrocities and their atrocities. And whoever wins gets to write the history.
That’s it. The rest is propaganda. Their propaganda and our propaganda. Of course, our propaganda is not propaganda. Our propaganda is just the truth. Because we’re not monsters. They are the monsters.
This is Day 202 of Israel’s war on Hamas, or its liquidation of Gaza, depending on your perspective. I haven’t said too much about it publicly. I said a few things about it when it began. That didn’t go well. No one was listening. The propaganda from both sides was already deafening. I described the Hamas attack as mass murder. My pro-Palestinian readers didn’t like that. I described Israel as a typical mass-murdering nation-state, no different than the United States of America, Germany, France, Spain, The Netherlands, the Soviet Union, the British empire, the Ottoman empire, the Holy Roman Empire, or any other mass-murdering nation-state or empire. My pro-Israeli readers didn’t like that. Neither side wanted to hear about history. The history of asymmetric warfare, or terrorism, depending on your perspective. The history of nation-states and empires. They wanted to hear a story about monsters. About the monsters on the other side.
I told you you weren’t going to like everything I said, right?
OK, let me say a few things about art now. If you didn’t like what I said about war, maybe you’ll like what I say about art. I can’t speak for other artists, but I’ll tell you why I think I became an artist, and what I have been trying to do as an artist.
I haven’t been trying to stop any wars. Or to pacify the human species. I don’t know how to do either of those things. And I am not a fan of propaganda. I confess, I have engaged in it from time to time, but mostly what I’ve been trying to do is deprogram minds, starting with my own.
We are all, by the time we realize we exist, the products of programming, ideological conditioning. I believe it is the job of artists to undo that, or at least to marginally interfere with it. That’s what art, and artists, did for me. They introduced me to my mind. My programmed mind. They forced me to think, and to see, and listen. They taught me to question, to pay attention. They dared me to deprogram my mind, and provided me with the tools to do it. OK, sure, some mind-altering drugs also helped, but it was artists that introduced me to those drugs. Then they introduced me to the monster I’ve been fighting.
I have been fighting this monster, in my art, in my mind, and out in the world for as long I remember. You have to fight it everywhere at once. To fight it in your mind, you have to fight it out in the world. And to fight it out in the world, you have to fight it in your mind.
Let me tell you about the monster.
The monster is legion. It goes by many names. It wears many faces. They change over time. William S. Burroughs called it “The Control Machine.” Some people call it the corporatocracy. I call it global capitalism. The monster doesn’t care what we call it. It doesn’t care who we are, what our politics are, or which side of what war we think we are on. It doesn’t care what we believe, which religion we profess. It couldn’t care less how we “identify.”
All it cares about is power. All it cares about is control.
It is everywhere, and nowhere. It has no country. No nationality. It doesn’t exist. It is everything, and nothing. It is the non-existent empire occupying the entire planet. It has no external enemies because there is no outside, not anymore. So there is no real war. There are only insurrections, carried out by rebels, traitors, terrorists.
The monster, our non-existent empire, is the first global empire in human history. It is not a group of evil people. It is maintained by people, but they are all interchangeable. It has no headquarters. There is no emperor. There isn’t any “Bastille” to storm. It is a logos. A system. An operating system.
It has no politics, no ideology. Its official ideology is “reality.” Thus it has no political opposition. Who would argue against or oppose “reality”? Lunatics. Extremists. The terminally deranged. And thus there are no dissidents, no opposing political parties. There are only apostates, heretics, blasphemers, sowers of discord, “reality” deniers.
It manufactures “reality.” Whatever “reality” it needs. The War on Terror. The War on Populism. The War on the Virus. The War on the Weather. The War on Hate. The War on Whatever. It doesn’t matter. It is all the same war. The same “Clear-and-Hold” op. The same counterinsurgency. It has been for about 30 years.
If things seem crazy, if you’re wondering what’s happening, that is what’s happening. That is all that is happening. That is all that has been happening since the end of the Cold War.
The empire is eliminating internal resistance, any and all forms of internal resistance. The monster is monsterizing everything and everyone. Transforming societies into markets. It doesn’t have anything else to do. It is erasing values. It is dissolving borders. It is “sensitivity-editing” culture. Synchronizing everything and everyone in conformity to its only value … money. Rendering everything a commodity.
It is the apotheosis of liberal democracy, the part where the monster does away with democracy, with the simulation of democracy, and proclaims itself “democracy.” It is global-capitalist Gleichschaltung.
That’s the monster I have been fighting.
Which makes me a terrorist. A conspiracy theorist. A Russian propagandist. A Covid denier. A right-wing extremist. An anti-vaxxer. An anti-Semite. A transphobic racist. An enemy of “democracy.” A Hamas supporter. A Donald Trump supporter. An AfD supporter. Whatever the official enemy happens to be today.
It makes me a criminal. A thought criminal. An art criminal.
Which I literally am. The German authorities are prosecuting me for disseminating art. For tweeting art. Pictures. Words. They banned one of my books. So maybe I’m marginally interfering with their ideological conditioning, with their programming, with their New Normal Gleichschaltung op.
If so, good, because, if I can quote another German, “art is not a mirror held up to reality, it is a hammer to shape reality with.”
And I’ll go a little further than Brecht. Every work of art we make shapes reality one way or another, whether we intend it to or not. It either feeds the monster or it fucks with the monster. The monster out there, and the monster in here, inside us, all of us … because it’s all the same monster.
Thank you, all of you who are fucking with the monster. That is all. Let’s keep it up.
In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on ‘the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists’ to discuss the ‘rapid crumbling of capitalism’ and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public, with more than a thousand turned away.
Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, and Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and writers and journalists were responsible for speaking out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out.
The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed and ‘all of us under the shadow of violent great power.’
Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda: ‘The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.’
Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear. Let me give you one example:
On 7 March, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on ‘the looming threat’ of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity.”
DOG WHISTLES AND AMERICAN POWER
No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A ‘panel of experts’ presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the West’s war industry.
‘Beijing could strike within three years,’ they warned. ‘We are not ready.’ Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough. ‘Australia’s holiday from history is over’: whatever that might mean.
There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway ‘lucky’ country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained ‘experts.’ What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful.
The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ‘national security reporters’ I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering.
‘How did it come to this?’ Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. ‘Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?’
The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, and George Orwell are obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans ‘foreign interference’ by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?
Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of ‘identity.’ American admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian taxpayer for ‘advice.’ Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra-low-rent politicians: a Johnson or a Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Zelensky.
No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about ‘crumbling capitalism’ and the lethal provocations of ‘our’ leaders. The most infamous of these, Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.
The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism,’ as you prefer. Ukraine, as modern Europe’s fascist beehive, has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy,’ which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.
Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine, and scores of statues of him and his fellow fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.
Martha Gellhorn, center, talks to Native American soldiers on the 5th Army on the Cassino Front in Italy, March 1944 during World War II. British Official Photo | AP
In 2014, neo-Nazis played a key role in an American-bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow.’ The coup regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name.
At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias‘ active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.
Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel,’ was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations, 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.
This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist,’ regardless of whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a Nato-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.
Journalists who traveled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job, and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.
In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligentsia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic.
Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s ‘assets’ in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.
The university hired a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the ‘important issue of academic freedom of expression’ and found ‘Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech.’ Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity, and its critics are to be punished.
A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that ‘for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life.’
No Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the corruption of the ruling class, and no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin revealed the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, and George Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, ‘the last to raise his voice,’ wrote Eagleton.
THE RE-GREENING OF AMERICA
Where did post-modernism — the rejection of actual politics and authentic dissent — come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, The Greening of America, offers a clue. America then was in a state of upheaval; Nixon was in the White House, and a civil resistance known as ‘the movement’ had burst out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that touched almost everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it presented the most serious challenge to Washington’s power for a century.
On the cover of Reich’s book were these words: ‘There is a revolution coming. It will not be like the revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.’
At the time, I was a correspondent in the United States and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialized his book, whose message was that the ‘political action and truth-telling of the 1960s had failed and only ‘culture and introspection’ would change the world. It felt as if hippydom was claiming the consumer classes. And in one sense, it was.
Within a few years, the cult of ‘me-ism’ had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political, and the media was the message. Make money, it said.
As for ‘the movement,’ its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton put an end to all that. The police were now in open war with black people; Clinton’s notorious welfare bills broke world records in the number of mostly blacks they sent to jail.
When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new ‘threats’ on ‘America’s frontier’ (as the Project for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.
In the years since America has gone to war with the world. According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s ‘war on terror’ was ‘at least’ 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
This figure does not include the dead of US-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure said the report ‘could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately ten times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision-makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOs.’
‘At least’ one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or five percent of the population.
The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the Western consciousness. ‘No one knows how many’ is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush — and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al. — were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a ‘media personality.’
In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, ‘What if the constitutionally freest media in the world had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims instead of spreading what turned out to be crude propaganda?’
He replied. ‘If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.’
Gen. Tommy Franks, head of US forces in Iraq, speaks with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos during an interview at the Coalition Media Center in Doha, Qatar, April 13, 2003. Steven Senne | AP
I put the same question to Dan Rather, the famous CBS anchor, who gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer, who had promoted Saddam Hussein’s ‘threat,’ and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, gave me the same answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having been ‘duped’ spoke for many reporters bereft of his courage to say so.
Their point is worth repeating. Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women, and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and Islamic State might not have existed.
Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its ‘allies,’ and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools?
WAR BY MEDIA
Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945: ‘Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.’
One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Obama’s two terms that American foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported.
‘I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,’ said Obama, who expanded a favorite presidential pastime, bombing and death squads known as ‘special operations’ as no other president had done since the first Cold War.
According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016, Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of color: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan.
Every Tuesday – reported the New York Times – he personally selected those who would be murdered by hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, and shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the ‘terrorist target.’
A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. ‘Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that,’ he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.’
In 2011, Obama told the media that Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi was planning ‘genocide’ against his own people. ‘We knew…,’ he said, ‘that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.’
This was a lie. The only ‘threat’ was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of Western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state.
Destroying Gaddafi’s ‘threat’ and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the US, Britain and France, Nato launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third was aimed at infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that ‘most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten’.
When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomized with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: ‘We came, we saw, he died!’
On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the Nato attack on Libya, which it described as an ‘array of lies’ — including the Benghazi massacre story.
The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.
Under Obama, the US extended secret ‘special forces’ operations to 138 countries or 70 percent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa.
Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s ‘soldier to soldier’ doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.
It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial elite. This elite’s ‘historic mission,’ warned the knowing Frantz Fanon, is the promotion of ‘a capitalism rampant though camouflaged.’
In the year Nato invaded Libya, in 2011, Obama announced what became known as the ‘pivot to Asia.’ Almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to ‘confront the threat from China,’ in the words of his Defence Secretary.
There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a ‘noose.’
At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any US administration since the Cold War – having promised, in an emotional speech in the center of Prague in 2009, to ‘help rid the world of nuclear weapons.’
Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.
I am writing this on 30 April, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the twentieth century in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I arrived in Saigon, and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognize the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda.
All through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its communist disease to the rest of Asia, allowing the Great Yellow Peril to its north to sweep down. Countries would fall like ‘dominoes.’
Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious, and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilization blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid: three million dead. The maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.
If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.
Feature photo | DVIDS
John Pilger is an award-winning journalist. His articles appear worldwide in newspapers such as the Guardian, the Independent, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Mail & Guardian (South Africa), Aftonbladet (Sweden), Il Manifesto (Italy).
