Bringing Down The New Berlin walls

In his latest article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes
how the Palestinian breakout of Gaza offers inspiration for people
struggling to bring down the new Berlin Walls all over the world.

By John Pilger

The recent breakout of the people of Gaza provided a heroic
spectacle unlike any other since the Warsaw ghetto uprising and
the smashing down of the Berlin Wall. Whereas on the occupied
West Bank, Ariel Sharon's master plan of walling in the population
and stealing their land and resources has all but succeeded,
requiring only a Palestinian Vichy to sign it off, the people of
Gaza have defied their tormentors, however briefly, and it is
a guarantee they will do so again. There is profound symbolism
in their achievement, touching lives and hopes all over the world.

"[Sharon's] fate for us," wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian,
"was a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent,
powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs,
religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and
religious tribalism, and co-opted [by] collaborationists. Look to
the Iraq of today – that is what he had in store for us and
he nearly achieved it."

Israel's and America's experiments in mass suffering nearly achieved it.
There was First Rains, the code name for a terror of sonic booms that
came every night and sent Gazan children mad. There was Summer
Rains, which showered bombs and missiles on civilians, then
extrajudicial executions, and finally a land invasion. Ehud Barak,
the current Israeli defence minister, has tried every kind of blockade:
the denial of electricity for water and sewage pumps, incubators and
dialysis machines and the denial of fuel and food to a population of
mostly malnourished children. This has been accompanied by the
droning, insincere, incessant voices of western broadcasters and
politicians, one merging with the other, platitude upon platitude,
tribunes of the "international community" whose response is not to
help, but to excuse an indisputably illegal occupation as "disputed"
and damn a democratically elected Palestinian Authority as
"Hamas militants" who "refuse to recognise Israel's right to exist"
when it is Israel that demonstrably refuses to recognise the
Palestinians' right to exist.

"What is being hidden from the [Israeli] public," wrote Uri Avnery,
a founder of Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace movement, on 26 January,
"is that the launching of the Qassams [rockets from Gaza] could be
stopped tomorrow. Several months ago, Hamas proposed a ceasefire.
It repeated the offer this week . . . Why doesn't our government jump
at this proposal? Simple: to make such a deal, we must speak
to Hamas . . . It is more important to boycott Hamas than to put
an end to the suffering of Sderot. All the media co-operate with
this pretence." Hamas long ago offered Israel a ten-year ceasefire
and has since recognised the "reality" of the Jewish state.
This is almost never reported in the west.

The inspiration of the Palestinian breakout from Gaza was
dramatically demonstrated by the star Egyptian midfielder
Mohamed Aboutreika. Helping his national side to a 3-0 victory
over Sudan in the African Nations Cup, he raised his shirt to reveal
a T-shirt with the words "Sympathise with Gaza" in English and
Arabic. The crowd stood and cheered, and hundreds of thousands
of people around the world expressed their support for him and for
Gaza. An Egyptian journalist who joined a delegation of sports writers
to Fifa to protest against Aboutreika's yellow card said: "It is actions
like his that bring many walls down, walls of silence, walls in our minds."

In the murdochracies, where most of the world is viewed as useful
or expendable, we have little sense of this. The news selection is
unremittingly distracting and disabling. The cynicism of an identical
group of opportunists laying claim to the White House is given
respectability as each of them competes to support the Bush
regime's despotic war-making. John McCain, almost certainly the
Republican nominee for president, wants a "hundred-year war".
That the leading Democratic candidates are a woman and a black
man is of supreme irrelevance; the fanatical Condoleezza Rice is
both female and black. Look into the murky world behind Hillary
Clinton and you find the likes of Monsanto, a company that
produced Agent Orange, the war chemical that continues to
destroy Vietnam. One of Barack Obama's chief whisperers is
Zbigniew Brzezinski, architect of Operation Cyclone in
Afghanistan, which spawned jihadism, al-Qaeda and 9/11.

This malign circus has been silent on Palestine and Gaza and
almost anything that matters, including the following announcement,
perhaps the most important of the century: "The first use of nuclear
weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate
instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."
Inviting incredulity, these words may require more than one reading.
They come from a statement written by five of the west's top military
leaders, an American, a Briton, a German, a Frenchman and a
Dutchman, who help run the club known as Nato. They are saying
the west should nuke countries that have weapons of mass
destruction – with the exclusion, that is, of the west's nuclear
arsenal. Nuking will be necessary because "the west's values
and way of life are under threat".

Where is this threat coming from? "Over there," say the generals.

Where? In "the brutal world".

On 21 January, on the eve of the Nato announcement, Gordon
Brown also out-Orwelled Orwell. He said that "the race for
more and bigger stockpiles of nuclear destruction [sic]" is over.
The reason he gave was that "the international community"
(basically, the west) was facing "serious challenges". One of these
challenges is Iran, which has no nuclear weapons and no
programme to build them, according to America's National
Intelligence Estimates. This is in striking contrast to Brown's
Britain, which, in defiance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, has commissioned an entirely new Trident nuclear arsenal
at a cost believed to be as much as £25bn. What Brown was
doing was threatening Iran on behalf of the Bush regime, which
wants to attack Iran before the end of the presidential year.

Jonathan Schell, author of the seminal Fate of the Earth, provides
compelling evidence in his recently published The Seventh Decade:
the New Shape of Nuclear Danger that nuclear war has now
moved to the centre of western foreign policy even though the
enemy is invented. In response, Russia has begun to restore
its vast nuclear arsenal. Robert McNamara, the US defence
secretary during the Cuban crisis, describes this as
"Apocalypse Soon". Thus, the wall dismantled by young
Germans in 1989 and sold to tourists is being built in the
minds of a new generation.

For the Bush and Blair regimes, the invasion of Iraq and the
campaigns against Hamas, Iran and Syria are vital in fabricating
this new "nuclear threat". The effect of the Iraq invasion, says
a study cited by Noam Chomsky, is a "sevenfold increase
in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks".

Behold Nato's instant "brutal world".

Of course, the highest and oldest wall is that which separates
"us" from "them". This is described today as a great divide of
religions or "a clash of civilisations", which are false concepts,
propagated in western scholarship and journalism to provide
what Edward Said called "the other" – an identifiable target for
fear and hatred that justifies invasion and economic plunder.
In fact, the foundations for this wall were laid more than 500
years ago when the privileges of "discovery and conquest"
were granted to Christopher Columbus in a world that the then
all-powerful pope considered his property, to be disposed
of according to his will.

Nothing has changed. The World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund, the World Trade Organisation and now Nato are invested
with the same privileges of conquest on behalf of the new papacy
in Washington. The goal is what Bill Clinton called the "integration
of countries into the global free-market community", the terms
of which, noted the New York Times, "require the United States to
get involved in the plumbing and wiring of other nations' internal
affairs more deeply than ever before".

This modern system of dominance requires sophisticated
propaganda that presents its aims as benign, even "promoting
democracy in Iraq", according to BBC executives responsible
for responding to sceptical members of the public. That "we" in the
west have the unfettered right to exploit the economies and resources
of the poor world while maintaining tariff walls and state subsidies is
taught as serious scholarship in the economics departments of leading
universities. This is neoliberalism – socialism for the rich, capitalism
for the poor. "Rather than acknowledging," wrote Chalmers Johnson,
"that free trade, privatisation and the rest of their policies are ahistorical,
self-serving economic nonsense, apologists for neoliberalism
have also revived an old 19th-century and neo-Nazi explanation
for developmental failure – namely, culture."

What is rarely discussed is that liberalism as an open-ended,
violent ideology is destroying liberalism as a reality. Hatred of
Muslims is widely advertised by those claiming the respectability of
what they call "the left". At the same time, opponents of the new
papacy are routinely smeared, as seen in the recent fake charges of
narcoterrorism against Hugo Chávez. Having insinuated their way
into public debate, the smears deflect authentic critiques of
Chávez's Venezuela and prepare the ground for an assault on it.

This is the role that journalism has played in the invasion of Iraq
and the great injustice in Palestine. It also represents a wall, on
which Aldous Huxley, describing his totalitarian utopia in Brave
New World, might have written: "Opposition is apostasy.
Fatalism is ideal. Silence is preferred." If the people of Gaza
can disobey all three, why can't we?