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December 29, 2002
Review: The new imperialists
JOHN Pilger is renowned worldwide as an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker and as a life-long campaigner for the rights of the weak and the vulnerable. In his latest book, The new rulers of the world, Pilger has put together an expanded version of his essays on the exercise of power in the present-day world by what he terms ‘the new imperialists’. He discusses how power is manipulated, aided and abetted by transnational media corporations which own or manage the world’s source of news and information.
It is a world in which humanitarian sentiment is exploited for realpolitik purposes, where ‘ignorance is strength and omission is standard practice’. This new imperialism has merely replaced the old, with its lexicon enriched by euphemisms such as ‘moral crusade’, ‘ethical dimensions’, ‘good governance’, and ‘third way’. Behind these terms lurks the same greed, the same injustice, exploitation, and insensitivity to human suffering.
His book is replete with examples. He recalls a visit to a factory outside Jakarta, owned by foreign interests, which makes clothes for the British and American markets. He sees over a thousand workers, mostly women, working in miserable conditions, living in labour camps nearby, alongside open sewers, prone to disease, up to half their wage of about one dollar a day being spent on drinkable water. Just ten miles away, in the Hotel Shangri-La a wedding takes place which costs $120,000. The hotel was built with an $86 million loan set up by the World Bank, whose mission in Indonesia, Pilger says, was ‘poverty reduction’ and ‘reaching out to the poor’.
He describes his visit to the city hospital in Basra in Iraq, where he sees little children helpless and dying because there are no medicines to treat them. He talks to Professor Doug Rokke in London who tells him that he has 5000 times the recommended level of radiation in his body, a level shared with many other Iraqis, because of the use of depleted uranium by US and Britain in their aerial attacks on Iraq. He meets Dennis Halliday, ex- Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, and Hans Von Sponeck, his successor as UN’s Coordinator of Humanitarian Relief in Iraq. Both resigned because they could not tolerate, to use the words of Halliday, ‘an entire society being destroyed’ through a policy that met the definition of ‘genocide’. Jutta Burghardt, Head of the World Food Programme resigned likewise.
Pilger goes to Washington to seek an interview with Madeleine Albright, the then Secretary of State, to ask her about her reply — “Yes, we think the price is worth it” — when questioned on CBS whether the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were a price worth paying for sanctions. He fails to get his interview but is able to meet James Rubin, the Assistant Secretary of State, with whom he has a long interview. His questions are met with clever polemics and evasions. He is given a lecture on the existence of the “real” world and the “ideal” world, and then sent packing.
His chapter on the “Great Game” illustrates the ways in which political and economic interests are protected with the ‘hidden hand’ and the ‘iron fist’. Fabricated myths replace facts, and foreign policy based on the concept of ‘racial supremacy’ with its ‘ethical dimension’ is propagated in the western media.
A one-way moral/legal screen of western values and innocence being threatened provides justification for the use of unrestricted violence. The dividing line is between “them” and “us”. The killing of those of “us” is a crime, to be met with maximum retribution; the rest are ‘unpeople”, says Pilger. The use of cluster bombs in Afghanistan is “entirely appropriate”, declares Geoffrey Howe, the British Defence Secretary in Parliament.
The German Ambassador in Sudan is quoted as conceding that as a consequence of the US missile attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan the death of several tens of thousands of Sudanese would be ‘a reasonable guess’. From Vietnam to Cambodia, from Ghana to Guatemala, from El Salvador to Diego Garcia, from Nicaragua to Panama — and many other places besides — he quotes instances of terror instigated or perpetrated by those who crusade against “terrorism”.
Turning to his own country, Australia, he contrasts the picture-postcard image of the Lucky Country with the sad plight of the Aborigines. He quotes from the poem of one of their poets, Kevin Gilbert, recalling the massacres of earlier times — “and the river ran red with [our blood] all the way to the sea...” There is Rob Riley, an Aborigine leader saying: “unless you give us back our nationhood, you can never claim your own”. Later he takes his own life. There may be some who will question Pilger’s statements and conclusions and opine that he is unfair in his portrayal of events. His is a moral judgment on the events as he sees them; and moral judgments are by their nature subjective. Be that as it may, sooner or later, the world being what it is, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, we will have to sit down to a ‘breakfast of consequences’.
Pilger has tried to peel away the facade behind which, in his opinion, lies a reality of hypocrisy and Orwellian double-talk. It takes courage to do this, and it is good for the world that there still are people not afraid to speak out and try to stir the human conscience. The famous character in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, of another time, posed some troubling questions: “If you prick us, do we not bleed; If you poison us, do we not die?; And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Pilger asks the self-same questions. They remain on the world’s agenda and will not go away. That is Pilger’s message.
The new rulers of the world
By John Pilger
Verso, 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG, UK.
Email: verso@verso.co.uk . Website:
www.versobooks.com.
Available in Pakistan at Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi. Tel: 021-5683026
Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk
ISBN 1-85984-393-X
246pp. £10. Special price in Pakistan Rs595
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