John Pilger
New Statesman
07 July 2011
Obama's greatest achievement is having seduced, co-opted and silenced much of liberal opinion in the US.
Barack Obama speaks in front of a screen showing his Twitter message.
US President Barack Obama speaks in front of a screen showing his Twitter message at the start of a 'Twitter Town Hall' July 6, 2011. Photograph: Getty Images.
How does political censorship work in liberal societies? When my film Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia was banned in the United States in 1980, the broadcaster PBS cut all contact. Negotiations were ended abruptly; phone calls were not returned. Something had happened. But what? Year Zero had already alerted much of the world to Pol Pot's horrors, but it also investigated the critical role of the Nixon administration in the tyrant's rise to power and the devastation of Cambodia.
Six months later, a PBS official told me: "This wasn't censorship. We're into difficult political days in Washington. Your film would have given us problems with the Reagan administration. Sorry."
In Britain, the long war in Northern Ireland spawned a similar, deniable censorship. The journalist Liz Curtis compiled a list of more than 50 television films that were never shown or indefinitely delayed. The word "ban" was rarely used, and those responsible would invariably insist they believed in free speech.
The Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, believes in free speech. The foundation's website says it is "dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity and creativity". Authors, film-makers and poets make their way to a sanctum of liberalism bankrolled by the billionaire Patrick Lannan in the tradition of Rockefeller and Ford.
The foundation also awards "grants" to America's liberal media, such as Free Speech TV, the Foundation for National Progress (publisher of the magazine Mother Jones), the Nation Institute and the TV and radio programme Democracy Now!. In Britain, it has been a supporter of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, of which I am one of the judges. In 2008, Patrick Lannan backed Barack Obama's presidential campaign. According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, he is "devoted" to Obama.
World of not-knowing
On 15 June, I was due in Santa Fe, having been invited to share a platform with the distinguished American journalist David Barsamian. The foundation was also to host the US premiere of my new film, The War You Don't See, which investigates the false image-making of warmakers, especially Obama.
I was about to leave for Santa Fe when I received an email from the Lannan Foundation official organising my visit. The tone was incredulous. "Something has come up," she wrote. Patrick Lannan had called her and ordered all my events to be cancelled. "I have no idea what this is all about," she wrote.
Baffled, I asked that the premiere of my film be allowed to go ahead, as the US distribution largely depended on it. She repeated that "all" my events were cancelled, "and this includes the screening of your film". On the Lannan Foundation website, "cancelled" appeared across a picture of me. There was no explanation. None of my phone calls was returned, nor subsequent emails answered. A Kafka world of not-knowing descended.
The silence lasted a week until, under pressure from local media, the foundation put out a terse statement that too few tickets had been sold to make my visit "viable", and that "the Foundation regrets that the reason for the cancellation was not explained to Mr Pilger or to the public at the time the decision was made". Doubts were cast by a robust editorial in the Santa Fe New Mexican. The paper, which has long played a prominent role in promoting Lannan Foundation events, disclosed that my visit had been cancelled before the main advertising and previews were published. A full-page interview with me had to be pulled hurriedly. "Pilger and Barsamian could have expected closer to a packed 820-seat Lensic [arts centre]."
The manager of The Screen, the Santa Fe cinema that had been rented for the premiere, was called late at night and told to kill all his online promotion for my film. He was given no explanation, but took it on himself to reschedule the film for 23 June. It was a sell-out, with many people turned away. The idea that there was no public interest was demonstrably not true.
Symptom of suppression
Theories? There are many, but nothing is proven. For me, it is all reminiscent of long shadows cast during the cold war. "Something is going to surface," said Barsamian. "They can't keep the lid on this."
My 15 June talk was to have been about the collusion of American liberalism in a permanent state of war and in the demise of cherished freedoms, such as the right to call governments to account. In the US, as in Britain, serious dissent -- free speech -- has been substantially criminalised. Obama the black liberal, the PC exemplar, the marketing dream, is as much a warmonger as George W Bush. His score is six wars. Never in US presidential history has the White House prosecuted so many whistleblowers, yet this truth-telling, this exercise of true citizenship, is at the heart of America's constitutional First Amendment. Obama's greatest achievement is having seduced, co-opted and silenced much of liberal opinion in the US, including the anti-war movement.
The reaction to the cancellation has been illuminating. The brave, such as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, were appalled and said so. Similarly, many ordinary Americans called in to radio stations and have written to me, recognising a symptom of far greater suppression. But some exalted liberal voices have been affronted that I dared whisper the word censorship about such a beacon of "cultural freedom". The embarrassment of those who wish to point both ways is palpable. Others have pulled down the shutters and said nothing. Given their patron's ruthless show of power, it is understandable. For them, the Russian dissident poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko once wrote: "When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie."
Saturday, July 23, 2011
The sheer brutality of colonialism
LeftyProf
09/22/2010
In my seminar on Politics and Literature of Postcolonial Africa, we have been discussing Aime Cesaire’s classic Discourse on Colonialism. For Cesahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifire (and several other radical Black intellectuals like W. E. B. DuBois), the emergence of fascism in Europe was not an anomaly, not an exceptional moment in European history.
Popular discussions, withing academia and without, encourage us to view the mass slaughter of millions of Jews under Nazi rule as an abnormality, an inexplicable deviation, in the onward march of European cultures and societies towards Progress, Reason and Enlightenment. So students are taught, very early on, to refer to “the Holocaust” in the singular, capitalizing the word to render it as a proper noun.
Cesaire argues, instead, that to view the emergence of Nazism in this light is to erase from historical memory the sheer brutality of colonial wars of conquest that have been the defining feature of European history in the modern era. In a brilliant passage (a favorite of mine), he demolishes the notion that European Nazism was an anomaly or deviation, and insists that we recognize the continuity, in cultural if not in political and economic terms, between European colonialism abroad and the Nazi atrocities at home.
I’ve been waiting a long time to quote this passage in full somewhere, and here’s my opportunity, finally. Cesaire writes:
First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a centre of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated”, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but sulrey, the continent proceeds toward savagery.
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind – it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.
The relevance of Cesaire today is not hard to understand. Think Abu Ghraib. Think Guantanamo. Think of the U.S. soldiers who have recently been accused of killing Afghan civilians “for sport.” Think of the manner in which a viciously racist campaign against Muslims and against Islam has led, in recent months, to mosques being vandalized and attacked, Muslims being physically assaulted, and Muslims as a group being blamed for the bombing of the World Trade Center.
In my seminar discussions, I often find that my students can accept all of this as true, as real, and applaud Cesaire’s polemical indictment of European imperialist culture, but balk at the political conclusions that this critique leads to. In particular, while they might learn to love Cesaire, they find the writings of Cesaire’s most famous student, Frantz Fanon, difficult to swallow, especially when they find him condoning, and indeed glorifying, violent, armed resistance to colonial rule.
One has to be reminded, time and again, of the utter savagery of imperialist domination and conquest. Absent this, it becomes difficult to comprehend the violence that resistance movements typically employ.
In this context, check out the latest blog post from ScarletGuju, a close friend and comrade of mine who is currently researching the Indian struggle for independence from British colonialism. If you ever had any doubts about the brutality of colonialism, take a look at this post, and the picture that accompanies it.
And then ask yourself what would you do if an occupying power brutalized your families, your friends, your neighbors in this manner, all for the crime of demanding the very liberty and progress that the occupiers held up as their “ideals.”
09/22/2010
In my seminar on Politics and Literature of Postcolonial Africa, we have been discussing Aime Cesaire’s classic Discourse on Colonialism. For Cesahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifire (and several other radical Black intellectuals like W. E. B. DuBois), the emergence of fascism in Europe was not an anomaly, not an exceptional moment in European history.
Popular discussions, withing academia and without, encourage us to view the mass slaughter of millions of Jews under Nazi rule as an abnormality, an inexplicable deviation, in the onward march of European cultures and societies towards Progress, Reason and Enlightenment. So students are taught, very early on, to refer to “the Holocaust” in the singular, capitalizing the word to render it as a proper noun.
Cesaire argues, instead, that to view the emergence of Nazism in this light is to erase from historical memory the sheer brutality of colonial wars of conquest that have been the defining feature of European history in the modern era. In a brilliant passage (a favorite of mine), he demolishes the notion that European Nazism was an anomaly or deviation, and insists that we recognize the continuity, in cultural if not in political and economic terms, between European colonialism abroad and the Nazi atrocities at home.
I’ve been waiting a long time to quote this passage in full somewhere, and here’s my opportunity, finally. Cesaire writes:
First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a centre of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated”, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but sulrey, the continent proceeds toward savagery.
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind – it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.
The relevance of Cesaire today is not hard to understand. Think Abu Ghraib. Think Guantanamo. Think of the U.S. soldiers who have recently been accused of killing Afghan civilians “for sport.” Think of the manner in which a viciously racist campaign against Muslims and against Islam has led, in recent months, to mosques being vandalized and attacked, Muslims being physically assaulted, and Muslims as a group being blamed for the bombing of the World Trade Center.
In my seminar discussions, I often find that my students can accept all of this as true, as real, and applaud Cesaire’s polemical indictment of European imperialist culture, but balk at the political conclusions that this critique leads to. In particular, while they might learn to love Cesaire, they find the writings of Cesaire’s most famous student, Frantz Fanon, difficult to swallow, especially when they find him condoning, and indeed glorifying, violent, armed resistance to colonial rule.
One has to be reminded, time and again, of the utter savagery of imperialist domination and conquest. Absent this, it becomes difficult to comprehend the violence that resistance movements typically employ.
In this context, check out the latest blog post from ScarletGuju, a close friend and comrade of mine who is currently researching the Indian struggle for independence from British colonialism. If you ever had any doubts about the brutality of colonialism, take a look at this post, and the picture that accompanies it.
And then ask yourself what would you do if an occupying power brutalized your families, your friends, your neighbors in this manner, all for the crime of demanding the very liberty and progress that the occupiers held up as their “ideals.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)