The Rise of a ‘Democratic’ Fascism

Traditional fascism is defined as a right-wing political system run by a dictator who prohibits dissent and relies on repression. But some analysts believe a new form of fascism has arisen that has a democratic façade and is based on relentless propaganda and endless war, as journalist John Pilger describes.

By John Pilger

The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.

“To initiate a war of aggression,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, “is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shortly before he was murdered on Oct. 20, 2011.

Ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shortly before he was murdered on Oct. 20, 2011.

Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.

Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.

In 2011, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten.”

Gaddafi’s Torture/Lynching

The public sodomizing of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a “rebel” bayonet was greeted by the then U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words: “We came, we saw, he died.” His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning “genocide” against his own people.

“We knew … that if we waited one more day,” said President Barack Obama, “Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be “a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda.” Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for NATO’s inferno, described by David Cameron as a “humanitarian intervention.”

Secretly supplied and trained by Britain’s SAS, many of the “rebels” would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by NATO bombers.

For Obama, Cameron and Hollande, Gaddafi’s true crime was Libya’s economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa’s greatest oil reserves in U.S. dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power.

Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the U.S. as it prepared to “enter” Africa and bribe African governments with military “partnerships.”

Following NATO’s attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, “confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency.”

The Kosovo Model

The “humanitarian war” against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent NATO to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing “genocide” against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo.

David Scheffer, U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59” might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and “the spirit of the Second World War.”

The West’s heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.

With the NATO bombing over, and much of Serbia’s infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the “holocaust.” The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines.”

A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The “holocaust” was a lie. The NATO attack had been fraudulent.

Expanding Markets

Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to capture its “natural market” in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia.

By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognize Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.

In Washington, the U.S. saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans. NATO, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo “peace” conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer’s duplicitous tactics.

The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the U.S. delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia — a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation — and the implementation of a “free-market economy” and the privatization of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; NATO bombs fell on a defenseless country. It was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.

American Interventions

Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations – 69 countries – have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America’s modern fascism. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as “sanctions.” The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.

“Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over.” These were opening words of Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment.

“The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,” said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records. The majority have been killed — civilians and soldiers — during Obama’s time as president.

The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In his lauded and much quoted book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of U.S. policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion. . . . Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.” He is right.

As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan’s first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?

Afghan’s Shining Moment

In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform program that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan’s doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers.

“Every girl,” recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon, “could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West supported.”

The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, “there was no evidence of any Soviet complicity [in the revolution].” Alarmed by the growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the “threat of a promising example.”

On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorized support for tribal “fundamentalist” groups known as the mujaheddin, a program that grew to over $500 million a year in U.S. arms and other assistance. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan’s first secular, reformist government.

In August 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of [the PDPA government], despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.” The italics are mine.

The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar’s specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a “freedom fighter.”

Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and “destabilize” the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, “a few stirred up Muslims.”

His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them.

Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called “Operation Cyclone.” Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah — who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help — was hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.

The “blowback” of Operation Cyclone and its “few stirred up Muslims” was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the “war on terror,” in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer’s message was and remains: “You are with us or against us.”

Threads of Fascism

The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its “free fire zones,” “body counts” and “collateral damage.” In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians (“gooks”) were murdered by the U.S.; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered.

Air Force F-105s bomb a target in the southern panhandle of North Vietnam on June 14, 1966. (Photo credit: U.S. Air Force)"

Air Force F-105s bomb a target in the southern panhandle of North Vietnam on June 14, 1966. (Photo credit: U.S. Air Force)”

In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot.

Today, the world’s greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama’s victims. According to the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA “kill list” presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. He then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains. Each “hit” is registered on a faraway console screen as a “bugsplat.”

“For goose-steppers,” wrote the historian Norman Pollock, “substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarization of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.”

American Exceptionalism

Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s.

As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, “The sovereign is he who decides the exception.” This sums up Americanism, the world’s dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognized as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognized brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western culture.

I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, U.S. losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this.

The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the “tragedy” of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places — just as the President himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood’s violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar this year for his movie, American Sniper, which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a “patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days.”

There are no heroic movies about America’s embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens — as it did in Brazil and most of Latin America.

Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the U.S.; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the “father” of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the U.S. space program.

In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of NATO, the heirs to a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its “new wave” hailed by the enforcer as “nationalists.”

The Ukraine Coup

This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum,” including gays, feminists and those on the political left.

These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On Feb. 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington to get “the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry.” If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.

Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine's Azov battalion. (As filmed by

Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine’s Azov battalion. (As filmed by

No western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe — with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the U.S. arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defense Minister as “the minister for defeatism.”

It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert Kagan, a leading “neo-con” luminary who was a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, which began pushing for the invasion of Iraq in 1998. She was a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Nuland’s coup in Ukraine did not go to plan. NATO was prevented from seizing Russia’s historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea — illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 — voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.

At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleaning. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions.

More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping “the violence” caused by the “Russian invasion.” The NATO commander, General Breedlove — whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove — announced that 40,000 Russian troops were “massing.” In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.

Repressing Ethnic Russians

These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine – a third of the population – have long sought a federation that reflects the country’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not “separatists” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous “states” are a reaction to Kiev’s attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.

On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history.” In the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).

The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says.” Obama congratulated the junta for its “restraint.”

If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah” role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On Jan. 29, Ukraine’s top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for U.S. and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: “The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army.” There were “individual citizens” who were members of “illegal armed groups,” but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news.

Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev’s Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for “full scale war” with nuclear-armed Russia.

On Feb. 21, U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorize American arms for the Kiev regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell’s fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America’s most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, “No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established.

“If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason.”

Nuremberg Lessons

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack.

“In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

In the Guardian on Feb. 2, Timothy Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, called, in effect, for a world war. “Putin must be stopped,” said the headline. “And sometimes only guns can stop guns.” He conceded that the threat of war might “nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement”; but that was fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that “America has the best kit.”

In 2003, Garton-Ash repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, “has, as [Colin] Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones.” He lauded Blair as a “Gladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist.” In 2006, he wrote, “Now we face the next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran.”

The outbursts — or as Garton-Ash prefers, his “tortured liberal ambivalence” — are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader.

The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash’s piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: “The F-35. GREAT For Britain.” This American “kit” will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world. In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.

Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base; they want its economy. Kiev’s new Finance Minister, Natalie Jaresko, is a former senior U.S. State Department official who was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship.

They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden’s son is on the board of Ukraine’s biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine’s rich farming soil.

Above all, they want Ukraine’s mighty neighbor, Russia. They want to Balkanize or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and Russia’s long Arctic land border.

Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country’s economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.

The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilization to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons.

John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com

27 comments for “The Rise of a ‘Democratic’ Fascism

  1. John the Ba'thist
    March 8, 2015 at 13:47

    Just word about Col. Qaddhafi’s alleged genocidal intentions toward Benghazi: Immediately before the beginning of the NATO bombing campaign against the Libyan military, police and government, the Libyan army did, in fact, retake Benghazi from the rebels. The feared large-scale massacre of captive fighters and widespread civilian casualties did not occur.

    Actually, the largest number of civilian casualties during the reactionary “revolution” were the result of NATO bombing.

  2. European American
    March 4, 2015 at 22:15

    Armed Citizens and a Fascist Police State cannot coexist.

  3. Mick McNulty
    March 4, 2015 at 16:30

    I think wherever fascism rises, as it did first in Italy, it won’t stop until it reaches its most brutal form, as it did in Nazi Germany. I think that is where America is headed if it isn’t stopped; it won’t stop short itself.

  4. paul wichmann
    March 4, 2015 at 09:18

    Pilger’s conclusion:
    “Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons.”

    The killer statement of a killer piece.

  5. March 3, 2015 at 14:06

    As usual, I learned a lot from John Pilger.

  6. Hillary
    March 3, 2015 at 08:50

    Once again a great piece of journalism from John Pilger.—thank you John.

    Yes Australia has produced some authentic ‘truth tellers’ such as ,Pilger ,Assange & Wilfred Burchett.

    Wilfred Burchett was the first western reporter to reach Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped. He wrote of the radiation sickness he witnessed and for his pains was blacklisted by the ‘septic tanks’ because there was no such thing the US authorities insisted. Wilfred had his Australian passport cancelled and was not even allowed back into Australia for his fathers funeral for telling the truth about US atrocities in the Korean conflict. Australia is lead by donkeys these days and follows the US slavishly in every despicable act of war it routinely commits. Thank you John for keeping the Southern Cross flag flying as opposed to the cringe inducing official pennant of servitude that Australia hoists, the Union Jack in it’s corner.
    Wilfred Burchett’s book on the Vietnam war “Grasshoppers and Elephants”. was probably the best account of that war, given from the Vietnamese perspective.

  7. Peter Loeb
    March 3, 2015 at 08:09

    “MOWING THE GRASS” IN GAZA

    In such an excellent article, it is difficult to see why Israeli-US aggressions and crimes against Gaza and Palestine along with continued home demolitions, starvations, state terrorism were just …well..was it “forgotten?” Perhaps Palestinian lives don’t really “matter”. Besides the many crimes , called “mowing the grass” in Israel,-are no longer in Western headlines.

    They are going on daily just the same. Homes and communities are continually under attack.
    The pictures are there for all to see. Only if no one looks, they are not even worth a single
    word much less a thousand words.

    —–Peter Loeb, Boston, MA USA

  8. Gerad Jenkins
    March 3, 2015 at 07:06

    It is amazing that the 90′ wars in the Balkans anticipated most of current developments from Ukraine, Libya, Syria, the Mide-East and the globe in general:
    Nationalists, Neo-Nazis, anarchic civil war-like conflicts, economic destruction, hyperinflation, full scale civil wars, massive propaganda and false narratives, islamism and radical islamism including Bin Ladens participation in the Bosnia war as well as Iranian military presence in the very same conflict, NATO false flags and anhilliation of international law, Western meddling and “thoughtful” choice of allies among islamic radicals and drug & human organ traffickers. The Balkans today: Ultra-neoliberal concepts were introduced after “appeasing” the region, plutocracy, de-facto slavery and pro-forma democracy…And it’s just another frozen conflict waiting for the next outburst, which might this time be the growing Albanian nationalism or the fragile situation in Bosnia& Herzegowina (where IS and other radical organization have already a base…).
    If one thinks of the current geopolitics as a new type of “Global War” or an hybrid WW3; it seems that it started once again in the Balkans.

    German ARD TV documentary with English subtitles: “It began with a lie” about the Kosovo War in 1999 and the illegal NATO air campaign:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW2-vNNWFsE

  9. Gerard Jenkins
    March 3, 2015 at 06:27

    Thank you, Sir!

  10. Abe
    March 2, 2015 at 23:44

    Fascist Corporatocracy: False Left-Right Paradigm
    By Chris Hedges
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho0O0hkZNZU

  11. Eirk
    March 2, 2015 at 21:10

    This is a fine summary. On the defining characteristics of fascism, I would add the promotion of the leaders’ group interests above those of others. It is the group self-promotion that allows the right wing to promise rewards to their followers, taken from other groups denounced as foreign or domestic threats. The group can be regional, ethnic, religious, national, or even recreational – the same dynamic is found in every group. As Aristotle warned of tyrants over democracies, they must create external threats to demand power as protectors of their group, and to denounce non-fascists as disloyal. It works every time, in all kinds of groups. The fascist focus on foreign enemies also distracts the people from the theft of their own domestic resources by the fascist oligarchy, and of course the war footing makes them ready to surrender popular power, individual rights, and quality of life to the oligarchy. It also conceals the nature of the fascist leaders, painting them as loyal protectors, when in fact they betray their supporters, betray the alleged ideals, and ruin their nations.

  12. Wallace M
    March 2, 2015 at 18:50

    Outstanding article and very well written.

  13. Zachary Smith
    March 2, 2015 at 18:09

    Guardian on Feb. 2, Timothy Garton-Ash

    It didn’t take long for me to find convincing (to me) evidence this fellow is a slick, glib, right-wing jack*ss. If there had been any lingering doubt, his being “a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford” was a nail in the coffin. Yet another reason not to bookmark the Guardian site.

    The parts about Serbia and Afghanistan were depressing reads, for I was totally taken in by the propaganda. Here in the middle of Indiana, all I had for news was the dreadful Indianapolis Star, and NBC/CBS/ABC. . Back then I hadn’t yet figured out that the National News broadcasts were simply not to be trusted.

  14. Zachary Smith
    March 2, 2015 at 18:08

    Guardian on Feb. 2, Timothy Garton-Ash

    It didn’t take long for me to find convincing (to me) evidence this fellow is a slick, glib, right-wing jackass. If there had been any lingering doubt, his being “a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford” was a nail in the coffin. Yet another reason not to bookmark the Guardian site.

    The parts about Serbia and Afghanistan were depressing reads, for I was totally taken in by the propaganda. Here in the middle of Indiana, all I had for news was the dreadful Indianapolis Star, and NBC/CBS/ABC. . Back then I hadn’t yet figured out that the National News broadcasts were simply not to be trusted.

  15. Cesar Geronimo
    March 2, 2015 at 17:09

    Are you seriously trying to defend Gaddafi?

    • Zachary Smith
      March 2, 2015 at 20:50

      In theory, captured criminals are supposed to be held for a trial. Shoving a bayonet into their anus is a novelty US policemen haven’t (to my knowledge) tried yet, though the New York Police have gotten so far as forcing a broomstick into the anus of Abner Louima.

      Are you seriously defending casual torture-executions?

      And where do you stand on Hillary’s gloating about the murder of Gaddafi?

    • sean
      March 4, 2015 at 15:02

      Do you seriously believe what the Zionist media was saying about kaddaffi?

    • European American
      March 4, 2015 at 22:21

      Libya, under O.G., was the most advanced country in Africa. Gaddafi might have been somewhat unusual, but the vast majority of Libyans loved him. After America and Nato spread its infectious “freedom and democracy” across their sovereign, peaceful country, while ousting their ruler, Libya has become an empty shell. Thank you AMerica. Thank you Israel and England. THank you ZIonist vermin.

  16. JDEsq
    March 2, 2015 at 15:27

    Brilliantly written.

  17. Joe Tedesky
    March 2, 2015 at 15:18

    This is a great article. If only there were a big enough alternative press to counter the huge propaganda mills we have now. Our problems come from the small few who has all the power. Between, free trade agreements, and corporate dominance I can’t see a good way forward. What will it take to change all of this?

    • Deschutes
      March 2, 2015 at 15:59

      It’s not as bad as you make it sound: the corporate media has sustained huge losses due to the digital revolution. Millions of progressives and everyday folks have abandoned the mainstream media to instead get their news from websites like this one, CounterPunch, Alternet, Democracy Now, etc.

      • Joe Tedesky
        March 2, 2015 at 17:52

        Thanks, for your comment. I needed that. I also read these websites you mentioned. Sometimes I get discouraged, but then there are good people like you to remind me there are others who feel as I do. Thanks!

        • Ryan
          March 3, 2015 at 13:42

          I agree with the initial points made. Namely that we need a much larger alternative net and that the MSM is dying due to its constant lies and omissions. Unfortunately, net neutrality will surely serve to muzzle the growing alternative media and erase it’s growth and influence.

    • Dogtowner
      March 4, 2015 at 15:17

      What we need, Joe, is a populace which occasionally exercises their brains. What disturbs me most is the so-called “educated” class which thinks itself mightily superior to all the rest of us slobs and gets all its information from NPR and the PBS Newshour, both purveyors of vicious propaganda. I was having a massage of all things and my massage therapist blurts out that the Russians are bombing Ukraine. I haven’t even heard the MSM say this, but this is a perfect example of the utter mindlessness of Americans. Of course when I told her later that her statement made me feel sick it somehow became my fault; she refused to own what she had said, it was a “throwaway line.” And this is how acceptance of war begins, from the lazy little brains of a mentally dysfunctional populace.

      • March 9, 2015 at 07:08

        You’re right about NPR — another wing of the official press. Unfortunately most people do not go to progressive news sites which wind up preaching to the choir as well as further educating it. I am fortunate to write a monthly column for a local, otherwise non-political magazine called “Veer” in which I wrote an article on a similar theme to this. It is also up here. Outreach is everything. We need to get more people looking at sites like this one. A good way to do it is to post links in other places including on-line newspaper forums.

    • March 7, 2015 at 02:38

      There’s another problem I’m seeing. Alt media sites like this are monitored. Just like that, it can rain nonsense. Dangerous nonsense. Someone says something factual and important and then, depending on what it is, half a dozen comments pop up saying exactly the opposite. The goal is to utilize a phenomenon called ‘social reality’. Unless you’re sure of yourself, you’ll take your cues from others. It’s natural enough. It’s called heuristics. You’d be surprised how forceful social reality can be. If a progressive website offers an article about Chomsky and one of the first comments is in support of Chomsky’s position on some aspect of American political culture and then suddenly a dozen other comments pop up saying that Chomsky is so confused about American political culture, other readers popping in will have a much harder time agreeing with the first commenter – if they don’t know that much. But you don’t have to be a complete ignoramus for that technique to work on you. No one knows everything. Except Chomsky of course.

      • Dogtowner
        March 7, 2015 at 15:20

        What you are saying, Arby, applies every day and in every way. If we do not have a core self — and very few people do — we are easily swayed by whatever we hear, whatever we see. One major reason Americans have become so vicious is that viciousness is the tone of our leaders and our media. They constantly hear viciousness touted as morality, as generosity, and they echo what they hear. On a simplistic scale I began to realize that popular culture is often simply a process of echoing: If everyone else likes [fill in the blank], then what is wrong with me that I find it boring or stupid? If I didn’t find human beings so horrifying and brutal, I would find them simply pathetic.

Comments are closed.