“WE ARE INTELLECTUAL PROSTITUTES”
John Swinton, the former Chief of Staff of the New York Times, was one of America’s best loved newspapermen. Called by his peers “The Dean of his profession”. John was asked in 1953 to give a toast before the New York Press Club, and in so doing made a monumentally important and revealing statement. He is quoted as follows:
“There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, in America as an independent press. You know it and I know it! There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who woud be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth: to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and the folly of this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks, they pull the string and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. WE ARE INTELLECTUAL PROSTITUTES”
Welcome to Orwell’s World 2010
By John Pilger
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”
Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions and diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”
In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said the “the world” supported the invasion in the wake of 9/11 when, in truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan “only after the Taliban refused to turn over [Osama] bin Laden”. In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, reported Pakistan’s military regime, and were ignored. Even Obama’s mystification of 9/11 as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, was told by the Bush administration that an American military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as “stable” enough to ensure America’s control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.
Obama’s most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a “safe haven” for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the West. His own national security adviser, General James Jones, said in October that there were “fewer than 100” al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 per cent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but “a tribal localised insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power”. The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of “world peace”.
Beneath the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing General Stanley McCrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of one of the most impoverished countries is a model for those “disorderly regions” of the world still beyond Oceania’s reach. This is a known as COIN, or counter-insurgency network, which draws together the military, aid organisations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, its aim is to pit one ethnic group against another and incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbecks against Pashtuns.
The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They bribed and built walls between communities who had once inter-married, ethnically cleansing the Sunni and driving millions out of the country. The embedded media reported this as “peace”, and American academics bought by Washington and “security experts” briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite was true.
Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into “target areas” controlled by warlords bankrolled by the Americans and the opium trade. That these warlords are infamous for their barbarism is irrelevant. “We can live with that,” a Clinton-era diplomat said of the persecution of women in a “stable” Taliban-run Afghanistan. Favoured western relief agencies, engineers and agricultural specialists will attend to the “humanitarian crisis” and so “secure” the subjugated tribal lands.
That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia where the ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam where the CIA’s “strategic hamlet program” was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Viet Cong — the Americans’ catch-all term for the resistance, similar to “Taliban”.
Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic-cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance – these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people. And yet for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.
The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his strange general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.
“It was curious,” wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same, everywhere, all over the world … people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same people who … were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”
www.johnpilger.com
Picture is of John Pilger
Phil Lohrey
December 31, 2009 at 12:24
…The Courage of the world’s finest journalist… All power to his mighty pen!!!
Philip Lowe
December 31, 2009 at 12:36
Intellectual Prostitutes.I’ve known a few well read whores in my time,of both sexes,and there are certainly more ways to prostitute ones self other than sex.However,as many of the ladies who are prostitutes do so because of intellectual learning disabilities,i.e.acute dyslexia,I had to smile wrily at the term,intellectual prostitute.
The thought of academics male or female, standing on dimly lit street corners,in compromising clothing,very shorty dark overcoats and brief business suits with split crotch,is more than my elderly imagination can cope with.
Leonard Colquhoun
December 31, 2009 at 19:17
Some artists are quick to proclaim their ‘courage’ when they produce art which insults, ridicules and sneers at Christianity, and are equally quickly lauded by the clever and credentialled elites from their safe and cosy refuges in their leafy inner suburbs.
(BTW, this is in defence neither of Christianity generally, nor of any of its tenets.)
Such a one was Andreas Serrano, who was praised in the late 1980s by large numbers of fellow-artists and art critics, plus the usual gaggle of celebs and media tarts, for ‘courageously’ standing up for artistic freedom and freedom of speech when he exhibited an RC crucifix in a stale bottle of piss. (Wonder if he’d tried to get it sponsored?) There have been numerous other examples of such ‘courage’ – safely in Christian or post-Christian cultures.
P’raps the (Spanish) Inquisition should crank up some auto-da-fes to make Mr Serrano feel that his efforts are worthwhile?
True bravery in such a quest for artistic freedom would be do do something similar in a public space in a Muslim country, or displaying a Mao effigy in a stale bottle of Tsing Tao* in Tienanmen Square.
Comment 1 eulogises “The Courage of the world’s finest journalistâ€, but his ‘courage’ seems to be of the same order as artist Serrano’s.
When Chomsky tackles, say, the Kremlin’s continuing media suppression in Russia, or starts to organise a demo demanding media freedom outside, say, his nearest Iranian embassy, or even goes to Iran to demand that the current demonstrators get a fair portrayal in the Iranian media, well, perhaps the claim expressed above might have some credibility.
Until then, he is just preaching to the easily converted and to the gullible, to Lenin’s ‘useful fools’, to each “idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, / All centuries but this, and every country but his ownâ€.
* Nice drop, Tsing Tao – served in the Me Wah restaurants each side of Oatlands [6331 1308 & 6223 3688] , and available now in some bottleshops. And reading the label, you can give yourself a lesson in the old and the new Romanisation of Chinese by noting that it is brewed in QÄ«ngdÇŽo. Kevvy 07 would be pleased.
Philip Lowe
December 31, 2009 at 22:02
John Wade#5 I was thinking more of the public toilets in Westminster.I believe Quamby Lane in Soho caters more for the non intellectual prostitutes.I think that Pilger is more refering to those of us who remain silent in exchange for a steady supply of booze and an excess of food and more T.V. channels.The immorality of consumerism?
Phil Lohrey
January 1, 2010 at 01:58
The subject of this forum deserves recognition. Lindsay and the best tastimes writers are brave to expose the sordid stories of this once-reputed fair isle. They persist despite social,financial and legal implications in a polity where the mass media control and suppress so much. The Murdoch press and U.S. TV networks relentlessly report wars with their own agenda. Pilger differs,and how!
John Pilger’s life has been in danger almost constantly for decades. He has narrowly escaped death a number of times. He reports from the ground in the Gaza strip and many of the most dangerous places on earth. His reports call loudly for justice. He never pulls punches. He writes for the best journals. This wonderful man has seen far too much for any but the strongest warrior for peace. Centuries from now, the history of journalism will laud the man and the journalist.
Just as the tastimes has kept me sane throughout the mainstream-suppressed forestry debate, Pilger brought me to tears when Murdoch and those TV networks bayed for war in Iraq. Pilger’s view from the ground has been borne out by history in his own time.
Are there others here who have learned to love Pilger?
Leonard Colquhoun
January 1, 2010 at 20:09
Comment 7’s claim that “John Pilger’s life has been in danger almost constantly for decades. He has narrowly escaped death a number of times. He reports from the ground in the Gaza strip and many of the most dangerous places on earth. His reports call loudly for justice†needs a few grains of salt.
Mr P is not in much danger in the Gaza Strip when he spouts the usual anti-US, anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic clichés which go across so well there. (BTW, he could probably do the same in Israel itself, at least as far as the anti-US and anti-Israeli govt stuff goes.)
But, here is something Mr P could get stuck into – artistic freedom. Could do a double act with Mr Chomsky.
Here’s the setting –
“As the protesters lay blindfolded in a . . . paramilitary van, blows and death threats rained down on them. One, however, was singled out for particular punishment.
“Afshin Ghaffarian’s identity papers described him as an actor, a profession that was not to the liking of the . . . militia commander in charge of the operation. ‘If you’re an artist we’ll beat you artistically,’ he said.
“Ghaffarian is a dancer — an activity banned . . . and punishable by long prison terms. ‘If he had known that he would have beaten me even harder,’ Ghaffarian said.
“He formed an underground dance company with four other performers while studying for a degree in theatre studies. They danced to music, touched each other and even appeared on stage partially undressed — all crimes under [their nation’s] law.
“After a year of clandestine rehearsals the company risked a public performance. ‘We chose 15 spectators, who included professors from [my] university, and drove them in a bus to the desert 50km [outside the capital],†Ghaffarian said.
“The landscape was vast, barren and inhospitable but, for Ghaffarian, it was a stage for the freedom that he craved. ‘It was a great experience,’ he said. ‘It was dangerous but . . . danger is part of our lives every day’.â€
Full story –
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6973467.ece
Looks right up Mr P’s alley, giving journalistic and personal support to Afshin Ghaffarian’s quest for artistic freedom. Could add it to his long list of journalistic triumphs.
Mr P and Mr Ch could also do something really daring, dangerous and ‘courageous’ in Gaza: speak for the various victims of Hamas, and Islamist violence and repression: women, girls, secularists, Christian Arabs, Fatah members & workers, – it’s a long list.
They could also denounce the rampant corruption which sees billions of aid intended for things like schools and hospitals siphoned off to bomb-making workshops.
Standing with battery-powered megaphones in Gaza City – now that would be ‘courageous’.
Phil Lohrey
January 2, 2010 at 12:13
Pilger speaks for little people. That is dangerous.
kim carsons
January 8, 2010 at 21:45
Leonard C seems to miss the point of the article, and why Pilger is an important voice.
PIlger is representing an opressed minority. But your arguments hinge on the fact that because he is not advocating the rights of the israelis, he is autimatically discredited.
YOu seem to posit an argument that goes “well Hamas a bunch of right winged terrorists, so there voice have no relevance…” this youve stated implicitly and by your omissions.
YEs we know that Hamas are not a progressive movement, but guess what – they were sponsored by the U.S. administration to begin with, and much like the ira they had their extremists and their moderates – the wellfare aspect, the political aspect, the military aspect.
so your middle of the road libertarian views are actually responible for the rise of fundamentalist positions within grounps like hamas. Instead of talking to the newly elected hamas government – they were placed under house arrest!! what is the results. back to a MORE fundamental position, a lack of political will, which incidently Israel and the U.S. have no wish to allow to flourish.
it’s all the way with JUSTICE IS MIGHT.
“When today we hear a politician or an ideologist offering us a choice between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppresion, triumphantly asking questions such as ” Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their elementary rights? what should make us suspicious is the very-self-evidence of the answer – who would have wanted that?”
Your position skews the conflict, making no mention of the fact of the vast inequalities that gulf the two peoples, the massive military backing of the u.s., the underhanded base-ball bat mentality of the israel/u.s, the conditions that have led to this small scale attacks, in the face of continuing state terror, organised and controlled to dismantle Palesinian soverignty, and the will to resist.
The truth is the opposite of the often cited claim that israel will be wiped from the map of history. since “the catastrophe” Palestine has been occupied, and expanded in a vast land grab, stealing the best land, cutting down olive trees, cutting off trade supplies, forcing the people into smaller pockets of land and increasing desperation.
for other perspectives perhaps read
antony lowenstein – my israel question
gideon levy – hareetz (jewish left wing newspaper online)
palestine – joe sacco
etc etc
Leonard Colquhoun
January 9, 2010 at 15:15
Comment 12 cites “hareetz (jewish left wing newspaper online)”.
Why?
Because Haaretz exists, and therefore it can.
One of the most prominent and enduring cultural features of Jewish life, even in the most deprived ghettos, has been a vigorous diversity of opinion, freely expressed, and with little fear of contempt or repression from fellow-Jews. As the Wikipedia article on the Talmud puts it: “The Talmud (Hebrew תַּלְמוּד talmÅ«d “instruction, learning”, from a root למד lmd “teach, study”) is a central text of mainstream Judaism, in the form of a record of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, customs and historyâ€.
Any Jewish State was highly likely to continue to allow, encourage and express this diversity.
Haaretz’s comment and opinion pages, also as reported by Wikipedia as recently as Sun., January 10, 2010 Tevet 24, 5770, are “open to a variety of opinions . . . coming from the right (not many), the center-right (still not many), the center (quite a few), the center-left (many), the far-left (let’s say that Haaretz has more than its fair share coming from this political camp).”
This is one of the strengths of the Israeli state, in that there exists a range and variety of competing, often contradictory, views, opinions and beliefs. There are at present 12 political parties in the Knesset, holding a range and variety of competing, often contradictory, views, opinions and beliefs; 21 other parties didn’t get enough votes for a seat quota. (Most Arab nations are one-party states – maybe Mr Pilger and Mr Chomsky could do a tour each, pointing out what a great weakness this is to them.)
A diversity of opinions is also one of the strengths of nations like ours. It is why our sorts of nations and cultures are likely to outlast our enemies.
Its lack is one of the major weaknesses of totalitarian regimes, whether theocratic, ideological or nationalistic. No-one dares say ‘Wait a minute’ or ‘Let’s try something different’; no-one still alive is fearless enough to ask ‘Are our enemies right?’ or ‘Is our poverty our fault?’
There are no Robert McMahons, Lindsay Tuffins, Alex Wadsleys, Bob Burtons, Mike Bolans, Brenda Rossers, BobHawkins, Buck Embergs, Chris Johnsons, Daniel Pedersens, David Obendorfs, and Deeper Throats in Gaza.
Well, not alive and / or at large.
Hanas, for example, killed scores of fellow Gazans identified with the secular, once vaguely socialist, Fatah organisation. But you won’t find letters, commentary and opinion articles denouncing this in the Gaza media, and questioning the sense, let alone the morality, of this butchery of fellow Palestinians. (And, puh-leeeze, none of this certifiably braindead ‘The Devil made them do it’ stuff.)
There are few equivalents of Haaretz, or indeed of Tasmanian Times, in the Arab / Muslim world, with Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia (none being ‘Arab’) among the exceptions.
Western criticism of Israel, from no matter how big a name, which can’t or won’t acknowledge this difference, and appreciate its importance, is naively ignorant, morally hypocritical or just bloody stupid.
Or childishly infantile.
kim carsons
January 10, 2010 at 02:45
did you actually read my post? or just jump on hareetz as a way of continuing your middle of the road libertarian rave.
You seem to be stuck in the same naiviety that you criticise in others ie. no acknowledgment of the other side of the equation.
Somehow you praise the diversity in israeli media but when there is ANY diversity in Western media, it is to be condemned??
Would you prefer we in the west all sung to the tune of the anti-defamation league?
Yes israel have a diverse media, this is not being denied. i mentioned Hareetz because they have voices like Gideon Levy who is extremely critical of its government
– who has compared israel’s occupation and oppresion of the palestinians and state sanctioned terror campaigns as an addict needing its fix (with the U.S. acting as the pusher)
YES we need more diversifaction of ideas, more infomation.
In fact it is OUR media that is extremely one sided. FAR more one sided than israeli media or AL JEZEERA. If you read Antony loewenstein’s book he outlines the way the media in this country frame the debate in tighter and more controlled circles.
And isn’t it also a question of gravitas. IS it unbiased when the ABC give their allocated 7sec grab to show both sides. SHould we in west be horrified at the GAZA atrocities. Shouldn’t media be acting independently, rather than rebroadcasting the spin, the falsifications that is coming from the israeli government.
THEy’re making plenty of money from this war, don’t forget.
The Israeli government is the largest supplier of homeland security technology.
They are divesting people from their land.
they are taking the most fertile soil,
they are destroying farmers livelhood.
they are building hatred between communities
they cut off trade supplies
they control most of palestinians land
gaza and rammallah are poverty traps at best, who are controlled and curfew by the IDF. So puh-leeeze consider this when you are banging on about how there are no voices. I have no doubt there are some, albeit few and diversified, just as i have no doubt we in the western media won’t be hearing about it any time soon
As for the totalitarian regime, if you take off blinkers you’ll find it IS ISRAEL that is the totalitarian regime in PALESTINE. An arab is a second class citizen in israel, and a GAZAN is far less than a citizen at all.
As for asking if you think the palestinian’s should ask themselves “Are our enemies RIGHT?”
NOW THAT is one to be gobsmacked by. right about what? – the continuing occupation, the apartheid conditions? the murderous bloodshed of men, women and children that happened in gaza a year ago?
So yes more voices, less borders. More voices to drown out the old rotten stagnent voices of hatred (which exist on both sides of the fence), the voices clinging to identity politics, driving a false wedge between people.
http://www.counterpunch.org/loewenstein01012009.html
http://www.voltairenet.org/article141464.html
Leonard Colquhoun
January 10, 2010 at 11:53
Comment 15 – yes.
And thanks for the compliment – “middle of the road libertarian”.
kim carsons
January 10, 2010 at 16:56
In answer to #14, a sphinxian question demanding an euripedean answer
– The indigenous people’s of any and every land. –
it would be be difficult to narrow it down, but taking into account the cumulative weight of history and what is the sphere of influence in the geo-political world one could perhaps say the Romani people – exiles, stateless wanderers – reviled the world over, footnotes in history, not worth the dust they walk on.
kim carsons
January 10, 2010 at 18:07
Unfortunately a middle of the road libertarian, by stading up for the particular, ignores the universal.
So yes you’ve read what i wrote, but you have nothing to say. After all to defend Israel is to defend state sanctioned murder, repression, systemic violence, rascism and the occupation.
By choosing to ignore the universal, your particularly cosy view of liberty stays safely within secure comfortable borders, making it possible for you to defend the indifensible.
here’s jennifer lowenstein’s piece on Israel
http://www.counterpunch.org/loewenstein01012009.html
Leonard Colquhoun
October 8, 2010 at 17:09
“Deadly blasts hit Sufi shrine in Karachi” BBC News, October 7, 2010:-
“At least 9 people were killed and another 55 others were apparently injured after two suspected suicide bomb blasts occurred near to the entrance of a Sufi shrine in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi.
“These two simultaneous suicide blasts reportedly struck the busy Abdullah Shah Ghazi Shrine, which is located within the Clifton district of the city, as worshipers were apparently leaving the complex after evening prayers. A local police official later confirmed that at least two children were amongst those killed, in these twin suicide bomb blasts.
“The bombings took place outside the complex, on Thursday night, which is deemed by many to be the most busiest night of the week as people gathered to distribute food to poor people within society.”
My questions to clever people like Mr Pilger, and others:
(i) Please explain how the “plight” of Palestinians motivates this sort of outrage, or how it is useful to ‘addressing the issue’ of their “plight”?
(ii) Please explain why people like the conspicuously compassionate Mr Pilger, and others, are not over in Karachi at this moment protesting, very conspicuously, as is their usual wont, about this needless death, injury and destruction?
Otherwise, ought we not take silence as consent?
kim carsons
October 9, 2010 at 18:02
re #19.
The only thing i can even begin to address the horrors of these events is that oppressed peoples have been pushed to the limits of hope, and have lost the idea of the sanctity of life in the process.
Through increasingly economic, political and military state power, the Israeli state is exterminating the rights of Palestinian self-determination, & the right to exist, ruthlessly crushing morale and human dignity to the point where ongoing bloodshed seems, for the militants, suicide, and the blood of others, seems to be the only response to this systematic oppression.
Israel “perpetual peace” is in fact a perpetual war of attrition, which seeks to annex and fragment Palestinian land, its sovereignty and right to live and prosper. Israel’s policies continue the slow and inexorable death of the Palestinian State and the continuing persecutions of its people.
Through removing the democratically elected Hamas, who like Sein Fein emerged from the IRA, moderate and democratic forces who could have been nurtured towards a true and viable peace process, wresting control from the extremists and begin real negotiations. Instead of negotiations, Israel have stalled the peace process indifinetly, and what we see at present is the well known corrupted and U.S. alligned Fatah reduced to a compromise in which the Palestinian people are being caught in a tightening vice.
As For Pilger, he clearly sees his as a voice not only for those people that have been denied a voice, but to offer another image of Israel of than the one it attempts to foster thru the mainstream media. Indeed it is not just left wing commentators like Pilger who reach these conclusions about Israel. The UN’s own investigation of the sanctions on Gaza, have been constituted as a crime against humanity, and their investigation of the flotilla found that the U.S citizin onboard the flotilla was summarily executed by the israeli army. This is confimed by an autopsy showing that the bullet was at close range entering by a person who was lying on his back at the time of the gunshot (see the realnews.com) This of course has been ignored by mainstream media, washington and Fatah alike.
In order to ask the same question back to you, i would ask you, if you can, to please explain why is it that supportors of Israel’s state sanctioned murders are not in Israel and Israeli embassies protesting over their executions of the u.s and turkish citizens onboard the gaza flottilla, the illegal settlements, the illegal Gaza sanctions that deprive peoples of basic foods and medicines, the brutal torture of innocents, the anti-democratic stance of one law for Israeli Arabs citizens and one law for Jewish citizens.
And be aware of this – If peace, ad infinitum, was maintained both both sides, what would be continue is the persistant violation of Palestinian human rights, and the illegal annexation of Palestinian land, until the already fragmented archipelego’s of Palestinian land would shrink into oblivion.
(i) please explain how this act of colonial and hegemonic barbarism, and how is it furthering a peaceful and equitable solution for the middle east
Otherwise should we not take this silence as consent to maintaining the status quo of the militant, right winged doctrine of the Israeli government?