Return
Of People Power
By John Pilger
30 August, 2006
Johnpilger.com
In
researching a new film, I have been watching documentary archive from
the 1980s, the era of Ronald Reagan and his "secret war" against
Central America. What is striking is the relentless lying. A department
of lying was set up under Reagan with the coy name, "office of
public diplomacy". Its purpose was to dispense "white"
and "black" propaganda - lies - and to smear journalists who
told the truth. Almost everything Reagan himself said on the subject
was false. Time and again, he warned Americans of an "imminent
threat" from the tiny impoverished nations that occupy the isthmus
between the two continents of the western hemisphere. "Central
America is too close and its strategic stakes are too high for us to
ignore the danger of governments seizing power with military ties to
the Soviet Union," he said. Nicaragua was "a Soviet base"
and "communism is about to take over the Caribbean". The United
States, said the president, "is engaged in a war on terrorism,
a war for freedom".
How familiar it all sounds.
Merely replace Soviet Union and communism with al-Qaeda, and you are
up to date. And it was all a fantasy. The Soviet Union had no bases
in or designs on Central America; on the contrary, the Soviets were
adamant in turning down appeals for their aid. The comic strips of "missile
storage depots" that American officials presented to the United
Nations were precursors to the lies told by Colin Powell in his infamous
promotion of Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction at the
Security Council in 2003.
Whereas Powell's lies paved
the way for the invasion of Iraq and the violent death of at least 100,000
people, Reagan's lies disguised his onslaught on Nicaragua, El Salvador
and Guatemala. By the end of his two terms, 300,000 people were dead.
In Guatemala, his proxies - armed and tutored in torture by the CIA
- were described by the UN as perpetrators of genocide.
There is one major difference
today. That is the level of awareness among people everywhere of the
true purpose of Bush and Blair's "war on terror" and the scale
and diversity of the popular resistance to it. In Reagan's day, the
notion that presidents and prime ministers lied as deliberate, calculated
acts was considered exotic; Nixon's Watergate lies were said to be shocking
because presidents did not lie outright.
Almost no one believes that
any more. In Britain, thanks to Blair, a sea-change in public attitudes
has taken place. No less than 80 per cent regard him as a liar; 82 per
cent believe his warmongering was a principal cause of the London bombings;
72 per cent believe he has made this country a target. No modern prime
minister has been the object of such informed opprobrium. In addition,
a majority remain sceptical about the veracity of a "plot"
to blow up aircraft flying from Heathrow. The recent, thuggish self-promotion
of the Home Secretary (Interior Minister) John Reid is rejected by a
clear majority, along with the media-promotion of Treasurer Gordon Brown
as the man who brought economic prosperity to Britain while acting as
paymaster for various imperial adventures. More than three-quarters
of the population believe Brown and Blair have merely made the rich
richer (YouGov and Guardian/ICM).
In my experience, this critical public intelligence and moral sense
have always been ahead of those who claim to speak for the public. What
Vandana Shiva calls an "insurrection of subjugated knowledge"
is on the rise in Britain and across the world, perhaps as never before,
thanks to a revived internationalism aided by new technologies. Whereas
Reagan could get away with many of his lies, Bush and Blair cannot.
People know too much. And there is the presence of history; no imperial
power has been able to sustain three simultaneous colonial wars indefinitely.
That is already true of the
United States and Britain in Afghanistan, where the "democratic"
puppet regime is in predictable trouble and the besieged British army
is having to call in American bombers, which, on 26 August, killed 13
fleeing civilians, including nine children, a
common atrocity.
In Iraq, in contrast to the
embedded lie that the killings are now almost entirely sectarian, 70
per cent of the 1,666 bombs exploded by the resistance in July were
directed against the American occupiers and 20 per cent against the
puppet police force. Civilian casualties amounted to 10 per cent. In
other words, unlike the collective punishment meted out by the US, such
as the killing of several thousand people in Fallujah, the resistance
is fighting basically a military war and it is winning. That truth is
suppressed, as it was in Vietnam.
In Lebanon, the pattern continues.
An armed resistance a few thousand strong has humbled the fifth-most
powerful army in the world, which is supplied and backed by the superpower.
That much we know. What is not known is the extraordinary and decisive
part played by the unarmed people of southern Lebanon. Reported as a
trail of victims, the spectacle of people heading back to their homes
was an epic act of defiance and resistance. On 13 August, as the Israeli
army advanced in southern Lebanon, they warned people not to return
to their homes. This was defied almost to a man, woman and child, who
abandoned the refugee centres and headed south, jamming the roads and
flashing victory signs.
An eyewitness, Simon Assaf,
described "gangs of local men along the route clear[ing] paths
by dragging away the piles of electrical cable, rubble and twisted metal
that littered the highway. A new stream of cars would rapidly form through
every breach in the rubble. There were no army or police . . . it was
the locals who directed traffic, guided cars past dangerous craters
and pushed buses up dirt tracks around collapsed bridges. As they neared
their homes, the refugees would form great processions. Town after town,
village after village was reclaimed. Powerless to confront this human
wave, the Israelis abandoned their positions and began fleeing to the
border. This flood of people emerged out of an unprecedented mass movement
that grew up across the country as the bombs rained down."
The Lebanese resistance,
armed and unarmed, is from the same wellspring as other movements throughout
the world. Each has learned to put aside its sectarian differences in
the face of a common enemy - rampant empire and its proxies. In Bolivia,
Latin America's poorest country, the first government of indigenous
people since their enslavement by Spain was elected by a landslide this
year, after hundreds of thousands of unarmed campesinos and former miners
faced the guns of an army sent by the oligarchic dictator, Gonzalo Sánchez
de Lozada. Marching on La Paz, the capital, they forced him to flee
to the United States, where he had sent his millions. This followed
a mass resistance to the privatising of the water supply of Cochabamba,
Bolivia's second city, and its takeover by a consortium dominated by
the mighty Bechtel company. Now Bechtel, too, has been forced to flee.
Throughout Latin America,
mass resistance movements have grown so fast that they now overshadow
traditional parties. In Venezuela, they provide the popular support
for the reforms of Hugo Chávez. Having emerged spontaneously
in 1989 during the Caracazo, an eruption of political rage against Venezuela's
subservience to the free-market demands of the IMF and World Bank, they
have provided the imagination and dynamism with which the Chávez
government is attacking the scourge of poverty.
Here in the west, as people
abandon the political parties they once thought were theirs, there is
much to learn from resistance movements in dangerous places and their
tactics of informed direct action. We have our own examples in Britain,
such as the achievements of the growing resistance to Blair and Brown's
privatising of the National Health Service by stealth. An American giant,
United Health Europe, has been prevented from taking control of GP (local
medical) services in Derbyshire, after the community was not consulted
and fought back. Pat Smith, a pensioner, took the case to court and
won. "This shows what people power can do," she said, as if
speaking for millions.
There is no difference in
principle between Pat Smith's campaign of resistance and that of the
people of Cochabamba who refused to pay almost half their income to
an American company for their water. There is no difference in principle
between the people's movement that saw off the Israeli invaders and
the stirring of people everywhere as they become aware of the real meaning
of the ambitions and hypocrisy of Bush and his vassal, who want us to
be ever fearful of and cowed by "terrorism" when, in truth,
the greatest terrorists of all are them.
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