The
Guardian
October 4,
2001
Similar
Outcries?
John Pilger
This week saw the end of an exhibition
I helped put on at the Barbican in London, devoted to photo-journalism that
makes sense of terrible events. Brilliant, subversive pictures from Vietnam
show the systematic rape of a country with weapons designed to spread terror.
The exhibition ranged from Hiroshima to two final, haunting images of sisters,
aged 10 and 12, their bodies engraved in the rubble of the Iraqi city of
Basra, where American missiles destroyed their street two years ago: part of a
current Anglo-American bombing campaign that is almost never
reported.
Since the outrages in America on
September 11, the exhibition has been packed, mostly with young people. Many
accused the media and politicians of misrepresenting public opinion and of
obscuring the reasons behind the fanaticism of the attackers. For them, the
most telling pictures are of "unworthy victims". Let me explain. The 6,000
people who died in America on September 11 are worthy victims: that is, they
are worthy of our honour and a relentless pursuit of justice, which is right.
In contrast, the 6,000 people who die every month in Iraq, the victims of a
medieval siege devised and imposed by Washington and Whitehall, are, like the
little sisters bombed to death in their sleep in Basra, unworthy victims --
unworthy of even acknowledgement in the "civilised" west.
Ten years ago, when 200,000 Iraqis died
during and immediately after the slaughter known as the Gulf war, the scale of
this massacre was never allowed to enter public consciousness in the west.
Many were buried alive at night by armoured American snowploughs and murdered
while retreating. Colin Powell, then US military chief, who 22 years earlier
was assigned to cover up the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and is currently being
elevated to hero status in the western media, said: "It's really not numbers
I'm terribly interested in."
An American letter writer to the
Guardian last week, in admonishing the writer Arundhati Roy for producing a
"laundry list" of American terror around the world, revealed how the blinkered
think. The lives of millions of people extinguished as a consequence of
American policies, be they Iraqis or Palestinians, Timorese or Congolese,
belong not in our living memory, but on a "list". Apply that dismissive
abstraction to the Holocaust, and imagine the profanity.
The job of disassociating the September
11 atrocities from the source of half a century of American crusades, economic
wars and homicidal adventures, is understandably urgent. For Bush and Blair to
"wage war against terrorism", assaulting countries, killing innocents and
creating famine, international law must be set aside and a monomania must take
over politics and the "free" media. Fortunately public opinion is not yet
fully Murdochised and is already uneasy and suspicious; 60% oppose massive
bombing, says an Observer poll. And the more Blair, our little Lord
Palmerston, opens his mouth on the subject the more suspicions will grow and
the crusaders' contortions of intellect and morality will show. When Blair
tells David Frost that his war plans are aimed at "the people who gave [the
terrorists] the weapons", can he mean we are about to attack America? For it
was mostly America that destroyed a moderate regime in Afghanistan and created
a fanatical one.
On the day of the twin towers attack,
an arms fair, selling weapons of terror to assorted tyrants and human rights
abusers, opened in London's Docklands with the backing of the Blair
government. Now Bush and Blair have created what the UN calls "the world's
worst humanitarian crisis", with up to 7m people facing starvation. The
initial American reaction was to demand that Pakistan stop supplying food to
the starving who, of course, fail to qualify as worthy victims.
The bombing intelligentsia (the New
Humanitarians, as Edward Herman calls them) are doing their bit, blaming
September 11 on "an evil hatred of modernity" and something called
"apocalyptic nihilism". There are no reasons why; the Barbican pictures are
fake. Aside from a few "errors", Anglo-American actions are redeemed, and
those who produce the "laundry list" of a blood-soaked historical record are
"anti American", which apparently is similar to the "anti-semitism" of those
who dare to point out the atrocious activities of the Israeli
state.
Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez lost
their son Greg in the World Trade Centre. They said this: "We read enough of
the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent
revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant
lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not
the way to go... not in our son's name."