(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The Essays of John Pilgers The new rulers of the world is well turned. The mix of personal destinies, heavy facts and revealing quotes from strategic planners; about oppression, about suffering, about death – with the West as co-responsible – gives the revelations of previously undercommunicated atrocities extra power.
It is unpleasant to read such. Unpleasant, such a political debate book should be. I do not get a better conscience that the book gives a lot of room to real people. This is Pilger's strong side.
However, my bullshit alarm starts to tickle when the atrocities are presented as part of a grand plan. A well-considered plot committed by the world's rich and powerful against the weak and poor.
It's a shame that Pilger ends up being a useful idiot to those he criticizes. The book reveals a number of critical issues. John Pilger is a brave documentary filmmaker, journalist and writer, but it becomes too easy to dismiss it all as rabid polemics when the precision level is low at crucial moments and the analyzes are in danger of falling into the conspiracy theory.
Bloody hands
The first of the four essays in The new rulers of the world deals with Suharto's bloody suppression of the Indonesian left in the 60 century.
The West was deeply involved in the crimes, according to Pilger. Britain sold weapons to the killers, and Western companies are said to have almost split the country's economy – sector by sector – among themselves at a meeting in 1967. All as part of the road to the introduction of capitalism in Asia.
The sanctions regime, the use of depleted uranium, and American and British bombing in the no-fly zones have led to enormous suffering for Iraq's civilian population. That is the theme of the second essay. Pilgrim also shows how Western leaders respond elusively when confronted with these events.
Furthermore, Pilger reveals how security policy considerations lie behind the military operations in Central Asia in the cooling water of 11. September, and how Aborigines in Australia are suffering from state repression. This is in stark contrast to the official discretion of the Sydney Olympics in 2000.
Heard it before?
The essays take up interesting things with others. Conditions that have received little attention in the Western press. This is especially true of the murders in Indonesia and Australia's oppression of Aborigines. The essays on these events are therefore timely, and it is appalling reading. A poor man gets several creepy a-ha experiences.
Newspaper readers, however, have heard several of the stories from Iraq before. Three leading UN representatives have resigned because of the terrible suffering Iraq's civilian population is undergoing because of the sanctions. It doesn't go unnoticed; not even in a press, which, in Pilger's own words, promotes American world domination.
A conspiracy?
Globalization and the war on terror is nothing more than imperialism in a new suit, Pilger writes.
But this time, the US is in the driver's seat, and they secure their power through the debt regimes and structural adjustment programs of the IMF, WTO and the World Bank. A violent military force has risen behind the mirror.
The state has not crumbled, as many globalization critics argue. The state has just taken new forms. More precisely, it has become the iron fist of capitalism that protects Western markets while guaranteeing the involvement (and abuse) of multinational corporations in other, and less developed, parts of the world, he believes.
This is probably mostly true, but Pilger does not stop there. It all becomes in the book's image an evil plan directed by a small clique around George Bush and his advisers. Pilger himself emphasizes that there is no question of any conspiracy or conspiracy: "This is simply how the system works, by ensuring" access "and" credibility "in a hierarchy that is always committed to attributing greater ethical intentions to government political strategists than the political strategists themselves. ”
Once again I give Pilger the right. There are no conspiracies. Throughout the rest of the book, Pilger himself constructs conspiracies.
worldView
The hunt for Osama Bin Laden is, according to Pilger, just a circus show. There are other considerations behind it. Regarding the operations in Central Asia, he writes the following: “This is just the beginning. The ultimate goal is a far greater American conquest, militarily and economically, which was planned during World War II and which, as Vice President Cheney says, "may not end in our lifetime."
The quote is symptomatic of Pilger's worldview, and he apparently gets legitimacy from the very vice president of The United States. He apparently admits the relationship. The only problem is that Cheney's quote is taken out of context. Unlike most other quotes in the book, it lacks reference, but some internet searches show that the words fell in an interview with the Washington Post in October last year. According to the BBC, the quote is really about the war on terror, and not about global world domination. We quote the BBC: “” It's different than the Gulf War was, in the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime. ” Mr Cheney indicated that he believed there would be more casualties, following the death of two American servicemen in Pakistan on Friday. "
Several errors
Misunderstand me correctly. Of course, the war in Afghanistan has security policy overtones and undertones, and it is perhaps strictly to judge a man by a single slendrian.
But the example above is not unique.
Both journalists and academics have kept quiet against knowing better, Pilger believes. "Maybe it has never been so quiet before?", He writes about the academics. But the truth is that one sees a budding repoliticization of the university environment both on this, and on the other side of the Atlantic. There are signature lists against the war in Iraq with prominent academics in both places.
Journalists are hit just as hard: "Minimizing the West's criminal guilt, not to mention mentioning countries based on their benefit to the West, becomes almost a professional act of faith".
Despite this, Norwegian media relatively often write critical articles about the West. It should of course have been more often, but there is no basis for a total black paint. However, it is possible this looks different "over there".
In addition, there are more obvious factual errors, such as that during the Operation Desert Storm, the West dropped 88 bombs on "Iran and Kuwait", when of course it was "Iraq and Kuwait".
Whether it is the translator – who otherwise does a good job – or the author who blings, is not known, but such errors spoil the presentation.
Overdue exaggerations
I'll stop there and admit that I have an ambivalent relationship with this kind of question. Pilger's book also puts your finger on something significant:
Western press tends to forget about crimes committed elsewhere in the world, and there is a big difference in how our died and their dead are counted and treated in the slits. A human life is not a human life, especially not when there is big politics in the picture. In Australia, people are thought of indigenously as part of the fauna.
Still, there is something about the dimensions. Pilgrim compares Australia to South Africa under the apartheid regime. United States of America with the Third Reich.
Although there should be certain parallels, the general comparisons are left relatively unfounded, and so that they are suitable for a political project. Perhaps it is in the nature of the debate book to use some rhetorical measures, but there may be limits.
When these boundaries are crossed, the claims, which in the main may be correct, become easy to refute. It is high time that leftist intellectuals like Pilger (but also Gore Vidal and Noam Vhomsky) launch a more striking critique of power. Only then does it become imperative to take them seriously. Only then will the disclosures have real political consequences.
