The Pay-Off Time

The National Museum of American History is part of the celebrated SmithsonianInstitution in Washington, DC. Surrounded by mock Graeco-Roman edifices withtheir soaring Corinthian columns, rampant eagles and chiselled profundities, itis at the centre of Empire, though the word itself is engraved nowhere. This isunderstandable, as the likes of Hitler and Mussolini were proud imperialists,too: on a "great mission to rid the world of evil", to borrow fromPresident Bush.

One of the museum's exhibitions is called "The Price of Freedom:Americans at war". In the spirit of Santa's Magic Grotto, this travesty ofrevisionism helps us understand how silence and omission are so successfullydeployed in free, media-saturated societies. The shuffling lines of ordinarypeople, many of them children, are dispensed the vainglorious message thatAmerica has always "built freedom and democracy" - notably atHiroshima and Nagasaki where the atomic bombing saved "a millionlives", and in Vietnam where America's crusaders were "determined tostop communist expansion", and in Iraq where the same true hearts"employed air strikes of unprecedented precision".

The words "invasion" and "controversial" make onlyfleeting appearances; there is no hint that the "great mission" hasoverseen, since 1945, the attempted overthrow of 50 governments, many of themdemocracies, along with the crushing of popular movements struggling againsttyranny and the bombing of 30 countries, causing the loss of countless lives. Incentral America, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's arming and training ofgangster-armies saw off 300,000 people; in Guatemala, this was described by theUN as genocide. No word of this is uttered in the Grotto. Indeed, thanks to suchdisplays, Americans can venerate war, comforted by the crimes of others andknowing nothing about their own.

In Santa's Grotto, there is no place for Howard Zinn's honest People'sHistory of the United States, or I F Stone's revelation of the truth of whatthe museum calls "the forgotten war" in Korea, or Mark Twain'sdefinition of patriotism as the need to keep "multitudinous uniformedassassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people'scountries". Moreover, at the Price of Freedom Shop, you can buy US ArmyMonopoly, and a "grateful nation blanket" for just $200. Theexhibition's corporate sponsors include Sears, Roebuck, the mammoth retailer.The point is taken.

To understand the power of indoctrination in free societies is also tounderstand the subversive power of the truth it suppresses. During the Blair erain Britain, precocious revisionists of Empire have been embraced by the pro-warmedia. Inspired by America's Messianic claims of "victory" in the coldwar, their pseudo-histories have sought not only to hose down the blood slick ofslavery, plunder, famine and genocide that was British imperialism ("theEmpire was an exemplary force for good": Andrew Roberts) but also torehabilitate Gladstonian convictions of superiority and promote "theimposition of western values", as Niall Ferguson puts it.

Ferguson relishes "values", an unctuous concept that covers boththe barbarism of the imperial past and today's ruthless, rigged "free"market. The new code for race and class is "culture". Thus, theenduring, piratical campaign by the rich and powerful against the poor and weak,especially those with natural resources, has become a "clash ofcivilisations". Since Francis Fukuyama wrote his drivel about "the endof history" (since recanted), the task of the revisionists and mainstreamjournalism has been to popularise the "new" imperialism, as inFerguson's War of the World series for Channel 4 and his frequent soundbiteson the BBC. 

In this way, the public is "softened up" for therapacious invasion of countries on false pretences, including a not unlikelynuclear attack on Iran, and the ascent in Washington of an executivedictatorship, as called for by Vice-President Cheney. So imminent is the latterthat a supine Congress will almost certainly reverse the Supreme Court's recentdecision to outlaw the Guantanamo kangaroo courts. The judge who wrote themajority opinion - in a high court Bush himself stacked - sounded his alarmthrough this seminal quotation of James Madison: "The accumulation of allpowers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether ofone, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, mayjustly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

The catastrophe in the Middle East is a product of such an imperial tyranny.It is clear that the long-planned assault on Gaza and now the destruction ofLebanon are Washington-ordained and pretexts for a wider campaign with the goalof installing American puppets in Lebanon, Syria and eventually Iran. "Thepay-off time has come," wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe; "nowthe proxy should salvage the entangled Empire."

The attendant propaganda - the abuse of language and eternal hypocrisy - hasreached its nadir in recent weeks. An Israeli soldier belonging to an invasionforce was captured and held, legitimately, as a prisoner of war. Reported as a"kidnapping", this set off yet more slaughter of Palestiniancivilians. The seizure of two Palestinian civilians two days before the captureof the soldier was of no interest. Neither was the incarceration of thousands ofPalestinian hostages in Israeli prisons, and the torture of many of them, asdocumented by Amnesty. The kidnapped soldier story cancelled any serious inquiryinto Israel's plans to reinvade Gaza, from which it had staged a phoneywithdrawal. The fact and meaning of Hamas's self-imposed 16-month ceasefire werelost in inanities about "recognising Israel", along with Israel'sstate of terror in Gaza - the dropping of a 500lb bomb on a residential block,the firing of as many as 9,000 heavy artillery shells into one of the mostdensely populated places on earth and the nightly terrorising with sonic booms.

"I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza," declared the Israeliprime minister, Ehud Olmert, as children went out of their minds. In theirdefence, the Palestinians fired a cluster of Qassam missiles and killed eightIsraelis: enough to ensure Israel's victimhood on the BBC; even Jeremy Bowenstruck a shameful "balance", referring to "two narratives".The historical equivalent is not far from that of the Nazi bombardment andstarvation of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto. Try to imagine that described as"two narratives".

Watching this unfold in Washington - I am staying in a hotel taken over byevangelical "Christians for Israel" apparently seeking rapture - Ihave heard only the crudest colonial refrain and no truth. Hezbollah, droneAmerica's journalistic caricatures, is "armed and funded by Syria andIran", and so they beckon an attack on those countries, while remainingsilent about America's $3bn-a-day gift of planes and small arms and bombs to astate whose international lawlessness is a registered world record.

There is never mention that, just as the rise of Hamas was a response to theatrocities and humiliations the Palestinians have suffered for half a century,so Hezbollah was formed only as a defence against Ariel Sharon's murderousinvasion of Lebanon in 1982 which left 22,000 people dead.

There is never mention that Israel intervenes at will, illegally andbrutally, in the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine, having demolished11,000 homes and walled off people from their farmlands, and families, andhospitals, and schools. There is never mention that the threat to Israel'sexistence is a canard, and the true enemy of its people is not the Arabs, butZionism and an imperial America that guarantees the Jewish state as theantithesis of humane Judaism. The epic injustice done to the Palestinians is theheart of the matter. While European governments (with the honourable exceptionof the Swiss) have remained craven, it is only Hezbollah that has come to thePalestinians' aid. How truly shaming. There is no media "narrative" ofthe Palestinians' heroic stand during two uprisings, and with slingshots andstones most of the time. Israel's murders of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall haveleft them utterly alone. Neither is the silence of governments all that isshocking. On a major BBC programme, Maureen Lipman, a Jew and promoter ofselective good causes, is allowed to say, without serious challenge, that"human life is not cheap to the Israelis, and human life on the other sideis quite cheap actually . . ."

Let Lipman see the children of Gaza laid out after an Israeli bombing run,their parents petrified with grief. Let her watch as a young Palestinian woman -and there have been many of them - screams in pain as she gives birth in theback seat of a car at night at an Israeli roadblock, having been wilfullyrefused right of passage to a hospital. Then let Lipman watch the child's fathercarry his newborn across freezing fields until it turns blue and dies.

I think Orwell got it right in this passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four, a taleof the ultimate empire:

"And in the general hardening of outlook that set in . . . practiceswhich had been long abandoned - imprisonment without trial, the use of warprisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions . . . andthe deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but weretolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened andprogressive."

John Pilger's new book, Freedom Next Time, is published by BantamPress. Courtesy, Znet.Originally published in the last week of July.