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The war on democracy

by John Pilger

Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a
wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her
grief with a determination that was a presence.

She was the embodiment of people's resistance to
the war on democracy.

I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office
film about the Chagos Islanders, a tiny creole
nation living midway between Africa and Asia in
the Indian Ocean.

The camera panned across thriving villages, a
church, a school, a hospital, set in phenomenal
natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the
producer saying to her and her teenage friends:
"Keep smiling, girls!"

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years
later, she said: "I didn't have to be told to
smile. I was a happy child, because my roots
were deep in the islands, my paradise.

"My great-grandmother was born there. I made six
children there. That's why they couldn't legally
throw us out of our own homes. They had to
terrify us into leaving or force us out.

"At first, they tried to starve us. The food
ships stopped arriving, [then] they spread
rumours we would be bombed, then they turned
on our dogs."

In the early 1960s Harold Wilson's Labour
government secretly agreed to a demand from
Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a
British colony, be "swept" and "sanitised" of
its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base
could be built on the principal island Diego Garcia.

"They knew we were inseparable from our pets," said Talate.

"When the American soldiers arrived to build the
base, they backed their big trucks against the
brick shed where we prepared the coconuts.
Hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and
imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through
tubes from the trucks' exhausts. You could
hear them crying."

Talate, her family and hundreds of the other
islanders were forced on to a rusting steamer
bound for Mauritius, a journey of 1,000 miles.

They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo
of fertiliser - bird shit.

The weather was rough, everyone was ill, two of
the women on board miscarried.

Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Talate's
youngest children Jollice and Regis died
within a week of each other.

"They died of sadness," she said.

"They had heard all the talk and seen the horror
of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they
were leaving their home for ever. The doctor in
Mauritius said he could not treat sadness."

This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy.

In one official file, under the heading
"Maintaining the fiction," the Foreign Office
legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover
their actions by "reclassifying" the population
as "floating" and to "make up the rules as we go along."

Article seven of the Rome Statute of the
International Criminal Court says the
"deportation or forcible transfer of
population" is a crime against humanity.

That Britain had committed such a crime - in
exchange for a $14 million discount off a US
Polaris nuclear submarine - was not on the
agenda of a group of British "defence"
correspondents flown to the Chagos by the
Ministry of Defence when the US base was completed.

"There is nothing in our files," said the
MoD, "about inhabitants or an evacuation."

Today Diego Garcia is crucial to the US and
British war on democracy.

The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was
launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which
the islanders' abandoned cemetery and church
stand like archaeological ruins.

The terraced garden where Talate laughed for the
camera is now a fortress housing the "bunker-
busting" bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft
to targets on two continents. An attack on Iran
will start here.

As if to complete the emblem of rampant,
criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-
style prison for its "rendition" victims and
called it Camp Justice.

What was done to Talate's paradise has an urgent
and universal meaning, for it represents the
violent, ruthless nature of a whole political
culture behind its democratic facade and the
scale of our own indoctrination in its messianic
assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a
"brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

Longer and bloodier than any other war since 1945,
waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism
dressed as economic policy and sometimes known
as globalisation, the war on democracy is
unmentionable in Western elite circles.

As Pinter wrote, "It never happened... Even
while it was happening it wasn't happening."

Last July US historian William Blum published
his updated "summary of the charming record of
US foreign policy."

Since the second world war, the US has:

- Attempted to overthrow more than 50
governments, most of them democratically elected

- Attempted to suppress a populist or national
movement in 20 countries

- Grossly interfered in democratic elections in
at least 30 countries

- Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries

- Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders

In total the US has carried out one or more of
these actions in 69 countries. In almost all
cases Britain has been a collaborator.

The "enemy" changes in name - from communism to
Islamism - but mostly it is the rise of democracy
independent of Western power or a society
occupying strategically useful territory and
deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone
criminality, is little known in the West,
despite the presence of the world's most
advanced communications, nominally freest
journalism and most-admired academy.

That the most numerous victims of terrorism -
Western terrorism - are Muslims is unsayable,
if it is known.

That half a million Iraqi infants died in the
1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by
Britain and the US is of no interest.

That extreme jihadism, which led to the
September 11 2001 attacks, was nurtured as
a weapon of Western policy - in "Operation
Cyclone" - is known to specialists, but
otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture in Britain and the US
immerses the second world war in an ethical
bath for the victors, the holocausts arising
from Anglo-US dominance of resource-rich regions
are consigned to oblivion.

Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed
"our man" by Margaret Thatcher, more than a
million people were slaughtered in what the CIA
described as "the worst mass murder of the
second half of the 20th century."

This estimate does not include the third of the
population of East Timor who were starved or
murdered with Western connivance, British
fighter-bombers and machine-guns.

These true stories are told in declassified
files in the Public Record Office, yet represent
an entire dimension of politics and the exercise
of power excluded from public consideration.

This has been achieved by a regime of uncoercive
information control, from the evangelical mantra
of advertising to soundbites on BBC news and now
the ephemera of social media.

It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct or
in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced
they are too clever to be duped.

Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to
deify Christopher Hitchens, a war-lover who
longed to be allowed to justify the crimes
of rapacious power.

"For almost the first time in two centuries,"
wrote Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent
British poet, playwright or novelist prepared
to question the foundations of the Western
way of life."

No Orwell warns that we do not need to live
in a totalitarian society to be corrupted
by totalitarianism.

No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake
proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us
that "disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who
has read history, is man's original virtue."

And grievously no Pinter rages at the war
machine, as in "American Football."

Hallelujah.

Praise the Lord for all good things...

We blew their balls into shards of dust,

Into shards of fucking dust...

Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives
blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey-Changey
of Western violence.

Whenever one of Obama's drones wipes out an
entire family in a faraway tribal region of
Pakistan or Somalia or Yemen, the US controllers
sitting in front of their computer game screens
type in "Bugsplat."

Obama likes drones and has joked about them with
journalists. One of his first actions as president
was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks
on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since
killed thousands, mostly civilians. Drones fire
Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the
lungs of children and leave body parts
festooned across scrubland.

Remember the tear-stained headlines as
Brand Obama was elected.

"Momentous, spine-tingling" (the Guardian).
"The American future," Simon Schama wrote, "is
all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed
with anticipation."

The San Francisco Chronicle saw a spiritual
"Lightworker... who can... usher in a new way
of being on the planet."

Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower
Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup
was taking place in Washington & Obama was their man.

Having seduced the anti-war movement into
virtual silence, he has given the corrupt US
military officer class unprecedented powers
of state and engagement.

These include the prospect of wars in Africa and
opportunities for provocations against China,
the US's largest creditor & the new "enemy" in Asia.

Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia,
Russia, has been encircled with ballistic
missiles & the Russian opposition infiltrated.

Military and CIA assassination teams have been
assigned to 120 countries. Long-planned attacks
on Syria and Iran beckon a world war.

Israel, the exemplar of US violence and
lawlessness by proxy, has just received its
annual pocket money of $3 billion, together
with Obama's permission to steal more and
more Palestinian land.

Obama's most "historic" achievement is to bring
the war on democracy home to the US. On New
Year's Eve, he signed the National Defence
Authorisation Act, a law that grants the
Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both
foreigners and US citizens secretly and
indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture
or even kill them.

They need only "associate" with
those "belligerent" to the US.

There will be no protection of law,
no trial, no legal representation.

This is the first explicit legislation
to abolish habeas corpus - the right
to due process of law - and in effect
repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.

On January 5, in an extraordinary speech at the
Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only
be ready to "secure territory and populations"
overseas but to fight in the "homeland" and
"support [the] civil authorities."

In other words, US troops are to be deployed on
the streets of US cities when the inevitable
civil unrest takes hold.

The US is now a land of epidemic poverty and
barbaric prisons - the consequence of a
"market" extremism that, under Obama, has
prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public
money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street.

The victims are mostly young, jobless, homeless,
incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the
first black president.

The historic corollary of a perpetual war state
is not fascism - not yet - but neither is it
democracy in any recognisable form, regardless
of the placebo politics that will consume the
news until November.

The presidential campaign, says the Washington
Post, will feature "a clash of philosophies
rooted in distinctly different views of the economy."

This is patently false. The circumscribed task
of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic
is to create the pretence of political choice
where there is none.

The same shadow is across Britain and much of
Europe, where social democracy, an article of
faith two generations ago, has fallen to the
central bank dictators.

In David Cameron's "big society," the theft
of £84bn in jobs and services exceeds even
the amount of tax "legally" avoided by
piratical corporations.

Blame rests not with the far-right but with
a cowardly liberal political culture that
has allowed this to happen and which, as
Hywel Williams wrote following the September
11 attacks, "can itself be a form of self-
righteous fanaticism."

Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its
managerial indifference to the freedoms
that it claimed to hold dear, bourgeois
Blairite Britain created a surveillance state
with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws -
more than for the whole of the previous century.

The police clearly believe they have an impunity
to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like
that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British
resident tortured and then held for five years
in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret
courts in Britain in order to "protect the
intelligence agencies" - the torturers.

This invisible state allowed the Blair
government to fight the Chagos Islanders
as they rose from their despair in exile
and demanded justice in the streets of
Port Louis and London.

"Only when you take direct action, face to face,
even break laws, are you ever noticed," Talate said.

"And the smaller you are, the greater your
example to others."

Such is the eloquent answer to those who
still ask: "What can I do?"

I last saw Talate's tiny figure standing in
driving rain next to her comrades outside
the Houses of Parliament.

What struck me was the enduring courage of their
resistance. It is this refusal to give up that
rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is
the seed beneath the snow.


This article appeared in the New Statesman.