From Hiroshima to Syria, the enemy whose name we dare not speak -- John Pilger

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

On my wall is the front page of Daily Express of September 5, 1945 and the words: “I write this as a warning to the world.” So began Wilfred Burchett’s report from Hiroshima. It was the scoop of the century. For his lone, perilous journey that defied the US occupation authorities, Burchett was pilloried, not least by his embedded colleagues. He warned that an act of premeditated mass murder on an epic scale had launched a new era of terror.

Almost every day now, he is vindicated. The intrinsic criminality of the atomic bombing is borne out in the US National Archives and by the subsequent decades of militarism camouflaged as democracy. The Syria psychodrama exemplifies this. Yet again, we are held hostage to the prospect of a terrorism whose nature and history even the most liberal critics still deny. The great unmentionable is that humanity’s most dangerous enemy resides across the Atlantic.

John Kerry’s farce and Barack Obama’s pirouettes are temporary. Russia’s peace deal over chemical weapons will, in time, be treated with the contempt that all militarists reserve for diplomacy. With Al-Qaida now among its allies, and US-armed coupmasters secure in Cairo, the US intends to crush the last independent states in the Middle East: Syria first, then Iran. “This operation [in Syria],” said the former French foreign minister Roland Dumas in June, “goes way back. It was prepared, pre-conceived and planned.”

When the public is “psychologically scarred”, as the Channel 4 reporter Jonathan Rugman described the British people’s overwhelming hostility to an attack on Syria, reinforcing the unmentionable is made urgent. Whether or not Bashar al-Assad or the “rebels” used gas in the suburbs of Damascus, it is the US not Syria that is the world’s most prolific user of these terrible weapons. In 1970, the Senate reported, “The US has dumped on Vietnam a quantity of toxic chemical (dioxin) amounting to six pounds per head of population”. This was Operation Hades, later renamed the friendlier Operation Rand Hand: the source of what Vietnamese doctors call a “cycle of foetal catastrophe”. I have seen generations of young children with their familiar, monstrous deformities. John Kerry, with his own blood-soaked war record, will remember them. I have seen them in Iraq, too, where the US used depleted uranium and white phosphorous, as did the Israelis in Gaza, raining it down on UN schools and hospitals. No Obama “red line” for them. No showdown psychodrama for them . . . .

Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article36191.htm

[struggle4progress]

1. What a mish-mash from Pilger. Mr Obama wasn't born until sixteen years

after the atomic bombing of Japan. He was barely nine years old at the time of the 1970 Senate report on Vietnam that Pilger cites. The catastrophic Indonesian occupation of East Timor began when Mr Obama was barely fourteen. Pilger apparently runs out of energy at this point, since he neglects to mention the genocide of the Amerindians, the institution of southern slavery, lynch law and Jim Crow, the Philippine-American war, the Ludlow massacre, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the mining of Nicaragua's harbors, or any number of other horrors for which Mr Obama bears no responsibility whatsoever, but that might have served to further work Mr Pilger into a self-righteous frenzy as he prepares to shriek "Under ..Obama, militarism has risen perhaps as never before"

PIlger, unfortunately, began calling Mr Obama an "Uncle Tom" long before he became President, and his ugly slurs have continued unabated ever since. Among his admirers, this perhaps qualifies as evidence of Pilger's Marxist credentials -- but, if so, that sadly shows just how much of the Marxian tradition has been effectively lost, because Marx himself suggested a method, not for noisy ideological denunciations, but for political-social analysis, based not only on a careful examination of economic conditions and material interests, but on attention to the actual political situation. Rambling over decades of US history, with no attention to details, is the antithesis of any useful analysis

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

2. The antithesis of any useful analysis?

Seriously? From you? Good Lord, that's about on par with Jack the Ripper lecturing on dating protocol -- just a bit much.

[struggle4progress]

3. I'll assume you mean that you approve of Pilger's slurs:

... John Pilger .... Before Barack Obama has even taken office or signed a single bill ... dismissed him as a sellout by using racial slurs ... One might be tempted to say, "at least give the guy a chance," but that would be a futile exercise ... John Pilger .. referred to him as an "Uncle Tom" ...
The racist flipside of anti-imperialism
For John Pilger to call Obama an 'Uncle Tom' betrays an ugly contempt for those who refuse his revolutionary romanticism
Sunny Hundal
Sunday 30 November 2008 08.00 EST

[yurbud]

4. maybe he actually looked at Obama's voting record.

[struggle4progress]

5. Since you're just speculating: mebbe Pilger is secretly on the payroll of some neo-nazi group

[yurbud]

6. then he is under very deep cover.

[struggle4progress]

7. I suppose, then, he must be under very deep cover as a Congressional observer, too