Social Democracy Now

In his most recent writings, an Australian-born journalist based in London, John Pilger, minces no words about the iniquities of either the Bush regime in Washington or the Blair cabal in London. In the wake of the Blair government's accelerating attack on traditional civil liberties, Pilger has taken to referring to the British government in the darkest tones, e.g., 'A small, determined and profoundly undemocratic group is killing freedom in Britain, just as it has killed literally in Iraq.' (SOURCE) Few could disagree.

Yet I read most everything Pilger writes and, while much is excellent from a moral point of view, I can recall no occasion on which he expresses scepticism or disbelief about the preposterous official narratives of 9-11 or the London bombings of July 7, 2005, nor any indication that he recognizes the current wave of terrorism as a synthetic phenomenon.

In Pilger's distorted take on terrorism, everything changed on September 11: 'In the sublime days before 11 September 2001, when the powerful were routinely attacking and terrorising the weak, and those dying were black or brown-skinned non-people living in faraway places such as Zaire and Guatemala, there was no terrorism. When the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly on 9/11, there was terrorism.' (SOURCE) According to Pilger, terrorism a la Bali, Madrid and London represents 'the latest stage in a long struggle against the empires of the west.' (SOURCE) By this interpretation, we are now living in a world in which the 'weak' are striking back against the 'powerful' and the authorities, in both the US and the UK, are simply responding to the threat by heavy-handedly increasing the power of the national security state.

Despite its popularity in the mainstream left (the same view is held by George Galloway, for instance), the theory that post-9-11 terrorism represents a stage in the war of the 'weak' against the 'powerful' seems to me a case of wishful thinking; it should be placed on a par with other reactionary moral-political fairy tales such as 'the good king' (stories about kings who wandered the streets of their cities incognito, thereby gaining insights into reality they were previously deprived of by their evil counsellors) and 'the good war' (the idea that the present war, whoever it's against, will lead to the creation of a more just world in which war will become unnecessary).

Many of us remain vulnerable to the attractions of moral-political fairy tales and would, no doubt, like to think that the victims of western imperialism had the capacity to strike back. While none of us would like to be counted among the victims of attacks coming from any source, our sense of justice does compel us to recognize the fact that sometimes the weak use abhorrent methods to punish their oppressors. Many of us probably find the idea even a little comforting (so long as we are not personally the victims), for who wants to live in a world in which the powerful are forever exempt from the consequences of their malevolent deeds?

Yet however comforting the idea may be that the 'weak' have begun striking back, there is no reason to believe that the current wave of terrorism has any such origin. For starters, if the 'weak' were striking back by means of terror attacks, the official stories of those attacks would make sense and all the evidence would be duly made public. Yet in every case the official stories are transparent and the evidence nonexistent. The CCTV images of the alleged London bombers at Kings Cross station, for example, still have not been released, even though they were apparently clear enough that they enabled the authorities to work out who the bombers were in the first place. Now if these images exist, there can be no reason for not releasing them. The fact that they still have not been released invites only one conclusion, and that is that the authorities are lying - lying about either the very existence of the footage or lying when they claimed that the images of the four men were sufficiently clear to enable their prompt identification.

BELOW: Instead of releasing the CCTV image of the alleged London bombers at Kings Cross station on July 7, the actual day of the bombings, the police have released an image of three of the four allegedly involved taken at Kings Cross station on June 28. They seem to think that the public is stupid enough to accept as evidence for the July 7 bombing a photo that was taken over a week before!:



I fail to see how a veteran crusading journalist like Pilger is unable to graduate to awareness that the authorities are lying to us. How seriously can we take the analysis of a person who can't even work out that there is no evidence to support the official story of the London bombings and unable to draw appropriate conclusions? Why should we exempt a 'determined and profoundly undemocratic group' from the allegation of lying? Why would a group of people determined to 'kill freedom' not use every means at their disposal to do so, including staged terror operations? Why should we assume that they would only pursue their ends by means of congenial legislation, when at the very least a suitable climate has first to be created to ensure that the public will tolerate legislation which in normal circumstances it would find abhorrent?

A depressing part of the experience of being a leftwinger today is the glaring lack of informed leftwing leadership at all levels - in party politics, the union movement, the media, the universities. By and large, the left's leaders today either have to be suffering from intellectual maladies that render them incapable of grasping the obvious, or someone is paying them to play dumb. At first glance, there seems no obvious reason why someone like Pilger should be suspected of belonging to the latter group. His commentary on the Middle East is usually so spot on, that it is hard to think of him as any other than what he presents himself as, a morally-earnest investigative journalist who's angry about the festering wound that is Palestine.

The fact, though, is that Pilger's commentaries on the Middle East situation have allowed him to build up an enormous amount of credibility on the left, while at the same time not telling most leftwingers anything they don't already know. This would make someone like him an ideal vehicle for manipulating the left. For the service that Pilger is doing to power - along with the likes of Chomsky and Galloway - is that he has helped inoculate many on the left against the idea of state-sponsored domestic terrorism. Many self-identified leftwingers remain deeply suspicious of 'conspiracy theories,' albeit usually without having done the least research into any of them. Their logic is pretty much: if there was anything to such theories, whether about 9-11 or the London bombings or any other terror attack, why don't people like Chomsky or Pilger endorse them? Viewed in this light, it's pretty clear that leftwing superbrains don't actually have to lie or disinform to control the left: they merely have to help police ruling class notions of what constitute the outer limits of acceptable leftwing discourse.

If we start from the most charitable hypothesis, which is that he is naive rather than complicit, it has to be said that Pilger, like Chomksy and other leftwing gatekeepers, has not discovered the one fundamental fact about the nature of contemporary power: it is more malevolent than ever because it is less accountable than ever. Once violent and other harmful acts are cloaked as the work of weaker groups to whom leftwingers are normally somewhat sympathetic, e.g., Muslims, the powerful effectively have carte blanche to do whatever they want to us. And thanks to the myopia of people like Pilger, who fall for the official (i.e., ruling class) explanations of these events, the powerful are sure to remain unaccountable for their appalling acts of terrorism long enough for them to accomplish all their ends. The most charitable interpretation I can put upon Pilger's recent writings, therefore, is that he truly believes in his own fable of the weak striking back against the powerful. But we will never navigate the present crisis while we allow ourselves to be led down the garden path by naifs subscribing to fairy tales.

SUPERBRAIN'S MOST IDIOTIC PRONOUNCEMENT EVER?: I neglected to mention in my previous post that Chomsky's response to the 9-11 caller on the McChesney radio show contains the following 'gem' of sophisticated political analysis: 'If you look at the evidence for that [the theory that 9-11 was an inside job] ... the evidence ... [is] the kind of evidence that you could put together to show that the White House was bombed yesterday.' (Mp3 audio file here) WHHAAAAT? How can anyone continue to respect Chomsky who has heard this blindingly stupid remark? Chomsky also claims, quite incredibly, that 9-11 conspiracy theorists 'are rather welcome to centres of power so they get a fair amount of publicity.' This is a bald-faced lie, to be blunt.