Imperialism and Iraq: Lessons from the past

Part Three

By Jean Shaoul, wsws.org
(Originally posted 31 May 2003)

The following is the conclusion of a three-part series. Part One appeared on May 29 and Part Two appeared on May 30.

RAF chief in Iraq John Salmond, in 1925. He helped King Faisal, a client of the British, suppress any and all attempts at insurrections via indiscriminate bombing.

[B]ritain provided Faisal with RAF bombers, armoured car squadrons and officers to lead the local conscripts, with which to respond to any insubordination on the part of the local population. Any uprising was handled by the bombers, which first dropped warning leaflets on the illiterate villagers and then bombed property and livestock. Bombing was even used to terrorise the peasants into paying taxes.

One the largest offensive operations mounted by the RAF was in 1923-24 in Southern Iraq. The tribal leaders responsible for collecting taxes from the semi-nomadic tribesmen and the peasants, who had become increasingly impoverished due to the diversion of the water channels by the most powerful sheikh, refused to pay up. The RAF was ordered to bomb the area in order “to encourage obedience to the government”.

Over a two-week period, 144 were killed and many more were wounded. It was by no means an isolated incident. The RAF was used repeatedly in 1923-34 against the Kurds in Mosul province, who rebelled against taxation and conscription.

One officer who had seen duty in the North West Frontier—no stranger to British brutality—feared that air control would only serve to inflame the situation: “Much needless cruelty is necessarily inflicted, which in many cases will not cower the tribesmen, but implant in them undying hatred and a desire for revenge. The policy weakens the tribesman’s faith in British fair play.”

But the British played anything but fair. One report to the Colonial office described an air raid in which men, women and children had been machine-gunned as they fled from a village. The politicians took care to ensure that the British public never learned about that incident.

Without the RAF, the regime could not have lasted, as Leo Amery, the colonial secretary, acknowledged. “If the writ of King Faisal runs effectively throughout his kingdom it is entirely due to British aeroplanes. If the aeroplanes were removed tomorrow, the whole structure would inevitably fall to pieces,” he said.

But since the RAF could not carry out normal internal security and the British required Iraqi treasury resources be spent on suppressing its own people, Faisal had to create an army. The army was to serve as an important means of advancement and social power base, providing the government or whoever controlled the army with enormous coercive powers. The degree of social discontent may be gauged by the fact that by the end of the 1920s, when the RAF had largely subdued the rebellious tribesmen in southern Iraq, the government was still spending 20 percent of its revenues on the army and 17 percent on the police.

One report to the Colonial office described an air raid in which men, women and children had been machine-gunned as they fled from a village.

Having established a regime that could secure the supply of oil, Britain could now dispense with Mandate rule and move to a treaty relationship that retained its substance. The Anglo-Iraqi Treaty gave Iraq formal political independence while retaining British control of foreign, defence and economic policy with military bases and a system of advisors. Iraq became “independent” in 1930 and was admitted to the League of Nations as a full member in 1932. But while the end of the Mandate gave the ruling clique a freer hand to do what they wanted within the country, real power rested with Britain and the Iraqi people knew it.

Britain overthrows a nationalist government

During the 1930s, the Sunni ruling clique’s dependence upon Britain became ever more difficult to square with popular sentiment. The Iraqi nationalists resented the IPC’s control of Iraqi oil, while the peasants and urban workers became increasingly impoverished. British policy in Palestine—its support for a Jewish homeland, Jewish immigration and the suppression of the Arab Revolt 1936-39—served to inflame tensions even further.

Iraqis visit the Najaf Heritage and 1920 Revolution Museum in the Khan al-Shilan building on February 27, 2014 in the holy city of Najaf, central Iraq. (AFP)

This led some of the Iraqi politicians and the military that had become increasingly powerful making and breaking governments to orientate towards Nazi Germany. In part this was due to a belief that it would free Iraq from the hated British, but in part it expressed political sympathy with fascism and its exploitation of anti-Semitism, fuelled by the situation in Palestine and the British cultivation of the Jewish financiers in Iraq. This was further exacerbated with the arrival in Baghdad in 1939 of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian nationalist leader, who had fled from the British.

The most prominent of the pro-German faction were pan-Arab nationalist Rashid Ali al-Gaylani and army officers known as the Golden Square, while the most prominent supporters of the British were Nuri al-Said and the regent for the four-year-old Faisal II. The regent, Faisal II’s uncle, was appointed on the death of the anti-British King Ghazi in a road accident in 1939 in which it was widely believed that the British had a hand.

Under the terms of the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, Iraq was bound to support Britain and break off relations with Britain’s enemies. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Prime Minister Nuri al-Said immediately broke off relations with Germany—a deeply unpopular move. But he was unable to persuade the cabinet to declare war on Germany or break off relations with Italy. In March 1940, he resigned as prime minister but served in the government of his pro-German rival, Rashid Ali.

By 1940, British positions in the Middle East were becoming increasingly beleaguered. Fascist Axis troops threatened Egypt and the Suez Canal. With the fall of France, French forces in Syria and Lebanon were under the control of the Vichy government. With Axis troops on Iraq’s doorstep, the British feared that Germany would invade Iraq and Iran upon which they were dependent for their oil supplies and wealth.

Relations between Britain and Iraq deteriorated rapidly as Rashid Ali manoeuvred Iraq into a more neutral position in the war, bought weapons from Italy and Japan and refused to grant British military forces landing and transit rights as required under the treaty. The British forced him to resign in January 1941, causing political uproar. The Golden Square officers mounted a coup in April and Rashid Ali was returned to power. Nuri al-Said and the Regent fled to Transjordan.

The new Iraqi government refused to allow the British troops to land in Basra, in effect ripping up the Treaty, and declared a “war of liberation” against the British. It was conceived as part of a wider pan-Arab attempt to get rid of French rule in Syria and Lebanon and put an end to the prospect of a Zionist state in Palestine.

The British denounced the government’s action as a revolt and sent forces from Transjordan and India to Basra, overthrew Rashid Ali and restored Nuri al-Said and the regent to power. After that, with British troops occupying southern Iraq, the government cooperated fully with the British war effort. The following year Britain was able to use it as a base from which to invade Syria and Persia where it installed a pro-British government to support its war effort. In 1943, Nuri al-Said’s Iraq declared war on the Axis powers.

Although the British despatched Rashid Ali and the Golden Square with relative ease, the short-lived regime was significant because it demonstrated how little popular support there was for Britain and its arch collaborators Nuri al-Said and the royal family. The pro-British politicians were henceforth spoiled goods as far as the Iraqi people were concerned. They were forever tainted by their return to power by British bayonets. As Louis explained in The British Empire in the Middle East, “The year 1941 represents a watershed in the history of the British era in Iraq, and its significance is essential in understanding the nationalist rejection of the treaty of alliance with the British in 1948 and the end of the Hashemite dynasty ten years later.”

Britain’s decline in the Middle East—1946-1958

Although Britain emerged from World War II with its empire in the Middle East intact, it faced very different conditions to those of 1939. The pattern of oil production had changed dramatically and by 1951 the Middle East was providing 70 percent of the West’s oil. Most of the world’s oil reserves were believed to be concentrated in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.

But at the same time as the region’s value was becoming ever more important, Britain faced rising political ferment in the emerging working class. In Palestine, Soviet and American backing for a Zionist state as a way of undermining British influence in the region and the widespread horror at the tragedy that had befallen the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis had paved the way for the United Nations vote in favour of the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel. It incensed the Arab world. In Iraq, Egypt and Iran, where Britain’s highhanded actions in 1942 mirrored that against Rashid Ali, almost all social layers were desperate to throw off the yoke of imperialist rule.

In Iraq, with their collaborators so thoroughly discredited, the British sought out a new ostensibly more progressive stooge in the shape of the first Shi’ite prime minister, Saleh Jabr. The British hoped he would institute reforms, prevent social discontent from fuelling the growth of the Iraqi Communist Party and forestall the overthrow of the regime. They also tried to re-jig Anglo-Iraqi relations in a new treaty that would preserve their military bases and access to the oil wells and serve as a model for restructuring relations in the region.

The incoming Labour government under Clement Attlee was no more adept at judging the political tempo in Baghdad than that of the arch imperialist Winston Churchill. When the terms of the treaty that Saleh Jabr and Nuri al-Said had agreed with Britain in January 1948—which would have extended the hated 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty for another 20 years—became known, students, workers and starving townspeople poured onto the streets in protest. The police were only able to suppress the riots with an orgy of brutality that killed nearly 400 people in just one day. Nevertheless the regent was forced to repudiate the treaty. Saleh Jabr resigned and the incoming government inaugurated the most savage era of repression and martial law. Britain’s model for restructuring its alliances in the Middle East policy was in tatters.

In 1950, the rising nationalist tide brought about an agreement between the US company Aramco and Saudi Arabia to share oil profits on 50-50 basis, setting up a chain reaction throughout the Middle East. The following year, the nationalist government of Mossadeq in Iran took steps to nationalise the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, forcing the British companies that owned the IPC to concede a 50-50 profit split with the Iraqi government or risk losing both the oil and its stooges, Nuri al-Said and his ministers.

By 1952, Britain’s imperial interests in the Middle East were resting on an even more fragile base. The Hashemite King Abdullah of Jordan had been assassinated in 1951 and his son, mentally unstable, had ceded the throne to his 17-year-old son, Hussein. In July 1952, the Free Officers under the formal leadership of General Muhamed Naguib and the actual leadership of Second Lieutenant Gamal Abdel Nasser had overthrown the Egyptian monarchy and repudiated the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty.

Against this background Nuri al-Said’s support for the British set him apart as a traitor in the Arab world. He was thus forced to carry out an unprecedented wave of repression, banning all opposition parties, closing down the press and handpicking a parliament to rubberstamp his decrees. It was under these conditions oil production finally surged ahead. Oil production doubled in the five years after the war, while revenues increased tenfold as a result of the Iranian crisis of 1951-53 and the 50-50 profit share agreement with the IPC. They rose from 10 percent of GNP and 34 percent of foreign exchange earnings in 1948 to 28 percent and 59 percent respectively in 1958. But instead of transforming the social conditions of the ordinary working people, the revenues went on agricultural developments that favoured the big landowners and swelled the bank accounts of the corrupt politicians.

In February 1955, Nuri al-Said played host to the British-organised regional security alliance of Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Iraq, known as the Baghdad Pact, that completed a network of alliances spanning the southern rim of Eurasia aimed at containing the Soviet Union. It represented a bid by the British to offset their declining power and give them a say in regional affairs. It was no more acceptable to the Iraqis than the 1948 treaty had been. The other Arab countries would have nothing to do with it. Egypt’s President Nasser, who was becoming a hero in the Arab world for his opposition to the British, denounced the pact vehemently as an attempt by Britain to assert its domination over the region and split the Arab world.

The Anglo-French military campaign in support of the invasion by Israel of the Suez Canal in 1956, aimed at getting rid of Nasser and reinstating Anglo-French control of Suez, outraged the Iraqi people. There were massive anti-British demonstrations all over Iraq. No one doubted for a minute that Nuri al-Said and the regent supported the British. Notwithstanding some face-saving formal protests to Britain, the Iraqi government clamped down violently on the demonstrations and once again resorted to martial law.

The Americans, in pursuit of their own national interests, forced the British to withdraw. The Suez crisis was a turning point. It marked a humiliating end to Britain’s hegemony in the region. Coming so soon after the CIA’s coup against Mosaddeq in Iran, it left the US the uncontested Western power in the Middle East. That in turn spelt the end of Britain’s client regime in Iraq.

The opposition parties, including the Istiqlal (the nationalists), the National Democratic Party, the Iraqi Communist Party and the small Ba’ath Party, the Iraqi branch of the pan-Arab party founded in Syria, came together to form a national opposition front. In July 1958, as tensions and mass demonstrations against the regime mounted, a military group known as the Free Officers overthrew Britain’s venal political agents, the Hashemite monarchy of Faisal II and the government of Prime Minister Nuri El Said, in a military coup. The royal family and Nuri were assassinated. Such was the loathing of the ancien regime that his naked body was dragged ignominiously through the streets of Baghdad until it was reduced to pulp.

Forty years of brutal exploitation and political repression by the British and their collaborators had come to an end.

British imperialism had depended upon the political submission of the colonial people, control of the political system and the ability to prevail over or at least placate its imperial rivals. As the record has shown, it was only with the utmost difficulty that the British maintained their rule in Iraq in the 1920s and ’30s. By the late 1940s, although Britain had emerged from World War II as the strongest of the second ranking military powers, it was all but bankrupt and totally dependent upon American support to maintain its imperial interests. By the 1950s, when American interests diverged from Britain’s, Britain was edged or shoved out of Palestine, Iran, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq.

Forty-five years on, the defeat of Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athist regime, by the US with Britain as its junior partner, signifies the return of direct imperialism and the most brutal forms of repression and exploitation that the Iraqi people thought they had got rid of in 1958. It is already apparent that many of the events of the past few months could have come straight from the records of the first imperialist occupation of Iraq.

The lessons of history show firstly that the US will—with UN endorsement—impose a military occupation fronted by some corrupt émigrés, former Ba’athists and anyone else who can be bought to enable US corporations to take charge of Iraq’s oil industry. Secondly, the US’s determination to control the world’s most strategic resources will lead to further invasions and occupations.

The re-emergence of wars and colonialism demonstrates more forcibly than ever before the need to build a broad international movement against imperialism and militarism. There is only one social force that can resolve the crisis for mankind created by imperialist capitalism and that is the international working class. It must fight for its own independent programme—the reorganisation of the world on the basis of a socialist perspective.

Concluded

Bibliography:
Farouk-Sluglett, M., and Sluglett, P., Iraq since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship, I.B.Tauris, London, 2001.
Gallagher, J., The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire: the Ford Lectures and other essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982.
James, L., The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, Abacus, London, 1994.
Kent, M., Oil and Empire, Macmillan Press, London, 1976.
Louis, W. R., The British Empire in the Middle East 1945-1951: Arab nationalism, the United States, and post-war imperialism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984.
Meljcher, H., The Imperial Quest for Oil: Iraq 1910-1928, Ithaca Press, 1976.
Sluglett, P. Britain in Iraq 1914-1932, Ithaca Press, London, 1972.
Workers League, Desert Slaughter: The Imperialist War Against Iraq, Labor Publications, Detroit, 1991.
Yapp, M.E., The Near East since the First World War: a history to 1995, 2nd edition, Longman, London, 1996.

By GAVIN GATENBY, BRUSHTAIL.COM.AU
(First published draft 20 August 2004)

[I]n Iraq, few days pass without the US Air Force bombing civilian targets. In a high-profile atrocity in May, a bunch of trigger-happy fly-boys shot up a village wedding in western Iraq, killing 45 guests including many children, and a Baghdad singer loved by millions, but these things happen almost daily in towns like Najaf, Samarra and Fallujah, and in other places too far from public gaze to warrant media attention.

The explanation – on the increasingly rare occasions that one is given – is always that these are precision strikes against “terrorists” (newspeak for resistance fighters), but the injured that reach the hospitals and the bodies that turn up in the town morgues are largely women and children.

The explanations don’t play well on the Arab Street where they’re received as confirmation of the persistent anti-Arab bias of the West – a view that is essentially correct.

Before you scoff, try this general knowledge test on a few well-read, politically literate friends: Ask them to name the first town in the world where civilians were indiscriminately bombed from the air.

More likely than not, they’ll cite Guernica, the Basque town reduced to rubble by aircraft of the German Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War. If they’re really up on their history, they’ll know it happened in 1937 and they’ll mention Picasso’s famous painting of the atrocity.

That answer is wrong, and symptomatic of a Euro-centric view of history that’s led western politicians to gravely underestimate the nationalist feeling and visceral distrust of the West that now has the US-led coalition bogged down in Iraq.

In fact the Guernica answer is wrong by a quarter of a century. It was the Italians, hell-bent on acquiring an African empire, who got the ball rolling. In 1911 the Libyan Arab tribes opposed an Italian invasion. Their civilians were the first to be bombed from the air, when the infant Italian air force bombed the oases of Tagiura and Ain Zara in a reprisal attack. The French followed in 1912, sending six planes to a “police action” in their bit of Morocco.

Pilots soon discovered that far from being a discriminating technique, aerial bombing was most effective against soft civilian targets – towns, bazaars, livestock and crops. In 1913 the Spanish began dropping shrapnel-type bombs on rebellious Moroccan villagers. Over the following years they graduated to poison gas.

The British, struggling to suppress nationalist movements in their vast empire, soon got in on the act. From 1915 onwards, the Royal Air Force bombed Pathan villages on India’s North-West Frontier. In May 1919 they attacked the cities of Afghanistan, dropping six tons of bombs on Jalalabad and inflicting 600 casualties in a dawn to dusk raid on Dacca. Then, on Empire Day, they hit Kabul with history’s first four-engine bomber raid. The British Government even offered poison gas bombs to their Indian Viceroy. Fortunately, he declined the offer.

Bombing the natives saved the RAF when post-WWI austerity measures looked like killing it off. The fly-boys proposed an experiment: if they could bomb a Somali tribal leader dubbed “The Mad Mullah” into submission at a fraction of the cost of a ground expedition, they’d survive. The aerial assault worked, and a delighted Winston Churchill told the RAF to take on rebellious Iraq, over which Britain had assumed a League of Nations mandate.

Contrary to widespread public perception, Guernica was NOT the first town in the world where civilians were indiscriminately bombed from the air.

They called it “control without occupation”, and, under Arthur “Bomber” Harris, the RAF took to “police bombing” Iraqi Arabs and Kurds with enterprise and enthusiasm.

By 1922 the RAF was deploying high-explosive and phosphorous bombs, an early form of napalm, anti-personnel shrapnel, “crows feet” shrapnel designed to kill and maim livestock and incendiaries to set alight thatch rooves. They even used bombs with time-delay fuses to prevent tribesmen from tending their crops under cover of darkness but when they stooped to machine-gunning women and children who had taken refuge in a lake, even the bellicose Churchill protested.

On other occasions, bombing was used to punish recalcitrant impoverished villagers for “non-appearance when summoned to explain non-payment of taxes”.

In 1924, in a draft report to parliament (complete with photos of what had been Kushan-al-Ajaza) Harris boasted that the RAF could wipe out an Iraqi village and a third of its inhabitants in 45 minutes.

1925 was a landmark year. The French bombed dozens of Syrian villages and even parts of Damascus, but probably the worst pre-Guernica incident occurred at Chechaouen, a Muslim holy town in Spanish Morocco. There, American mercenary fliers of the French Flying Corp indiscriminately bombed the undefended town in revenge for a severe defeat suffered by the retreating Spanish army. The London Times reporter called it “the most cruel, the most wanton, and the most unjustifiable act of the whole war”, and reported that “absolutely defenceless women and children were massacred and many others were maimed and blinded”. 

Thus it went on, until the Second World War, and afterwards, through the eight years of the French war in Algeria, the Israeli repression of the Palestinians and the bombing of Iraq during the 12 years of post-Gulf War sanctions. The technology has “improved”, but the political intention, and the outcome, in terms of dead civilians, remains the same.

So why do most of us think of Guernica was the first indiscriminate air attack on civilians? Well, the Basques were on the north side of the Mediterranean, and were thus European, whereas, in Western public opinion and international law, people outside the pale of European civilisation just didn’t count – they were “turbulent”, “rebellious”or “uncivilised” tribesmen, bombing of whom was a normal, acceptable, policing technique.

They didn’t teach you this stuff at school or show it to you on TV during phase one of the Iraq war, but don’t imagine the Arabs and Afghans don’t remember.

© Gavin Gatenby, 2004.

____________________________________

References:

Sven Lindquist, A history of bombing, Granta 2002.
Lawrence James, Raj, The Making and Unmaking of British India, TSP 1998.
Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq 1914-1932, London Ithica Press, 1976.
David Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919-1939, Manchester University Press.

[T]o study the effects of political propaganda in what used to be called the ‘free world’ there could hardly be a better time than now. We are living through an instance of insidious propaganda that has clean contours. It fills a common need. In a period of large-scale slaughter and other man-made disaster the morally conscious person can do with some clear categories of good and bad, desirable and despicable. Political certainty, in other words. You can even sell wars using ‘moral clarity’ as a sales pitch, as happened with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Good-evil classification is easy enough when we have imprisoned journalists decapitated by jihadis. Those who “will do something about that” are automatically placed in the ‘good guys’ category. But there is a problem of murkiness in this sample. Syria’s Assad has been listed for years at the top of the bad guy list, and yet he appears to be changing into something of an ally of those who are intent now on setting things straight. On top of which, the fact that the radical Islamists out of which ISIS emerged were funded and encouraged by the United States and its Arab allies is not a deep secret, and the fact that none of this mayhem would now exist were it not for the sorcerer’s apprentice effect of the decapitation of the Iraqi state in 2003 has been pretty much agreed on.

The Ukraine sample is more clear-cut. Here we have fighters for democracy and other Western values in Kiev vs a character who is throwing a spanner in the works, who does not respect the sovereignty of neighbors, and whose intransigence does not lessen, no matter what sanctions you throw at him.

The story of the downed plane with 298 dead people is no longer news, and the investigation as to who shot it down? Don’t hold your breath. Last week Dutch viewers of a TV news program were informed about something that had been doing the rounds on internet samizdat: the countries participating in the MH17 investigation have signed a nondisclosure agreement. Any of the participants (which include Kiev) has the right to veto publication of the results without explanation. The truth about the cause of the horrifying fate of the 298 appears to have been already settled by propaganda. That means that although there has been no shred of evidence that the official story of the ‘rebels’ shooting down the plane with Russian involvement, it remains a justification for sanctions against Russia.

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SPECIAL BONUS: THE WORLD OF PROPAGANDA by Tariq Ali

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After the crisis slogged along for weeks with further bloodshed and bombing devastation, and anxious NATO grumbling about whether Putin’s white trucks with humanitarian relief supplies could possibly amount to a fifth column, interest in the Ukraine crisis has reached another peak in the mainstream media with an alleged Russian invasion to aid the ‘rebels’. On September 1 st the NY-Times carried an op-ed article announcing that “Russia and Ukraine are now at war.” Another propaganda product? It certainly looks like it. Foreign volunteers, even French ones, appear to have joined the ‘rebels’ and most of them are likely to be Russian – don’t forget that the fighters of Donetsk and Lugansk have neighbors and relations just across the border. But as the new Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Donetsk National Republic Alexander Zakharchenko answered a foreign reporter at his press conference: if there were Russian military units fighting beside his forces they could already have moved on Kiev. From sparse information one gets the impression that his forces are doing rather well on their own without the Russians. They are also helped along by deserting Kiev troops who lack enthusiasm for killing their Eastern brethren.

Dispassionate editors have hardly any direct means to find out what may be happening on the ground in Donetsk and Lugansk, because they cannot send experienced reporters to where the fighting takes place. The astronomical insurance costs involved cannot be met by their budgets. So we have little more to go on than what we can glean from some internet sites with good track records.

The propaganda line from the State Department and the White House on the MH17 disaster became less emphatic after US intelligence analysts – leaking opinion to reporters – refused to play ball, but it is back in force on the Russian invasion theme, while the good-evil scheme is still maintained and nurtured by sundry American publications. These include some that have a reputation to uphold, like Foreign Policy, or that once were considered relatively liberal-minded beacons, like The New Republic, whose demise as a relatively reliable source of political knowledge we ought to mourn.

It has only been in the last few days that an exceptional article in Foreign Affairs, by the exceptional scholar of geopolitics, John Mearsheimer, is beginning to register. Mearsheimer lays most of the responsibility for the Ukraine crisis where it belongs: Washington and its European allies. “U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.” It will take time before this analysis reaches and convinces some serious European editors. Another sane voice is Stephen Cohen’s, who ought to be the first author anyone hoping to understand Putin’s Russia should read. But ‘patriotic heretics’, as he calls himself, are now very badly treated in print, with he himself being raked over the coals by the New Republic.

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The truth about the cause of the horrifying fate of the 298 on flight MH17 appears to have been settled by propaganda. That means that although there has been no shred of evidence that the official story of the ‘rebels’ shooting down the plane with Russian involvement, it remains a justification for sanctions against Russia.

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Justin Fox: Glorified media maggot doing his (unwitting?) part in the machinery of Western propaganda.

The mark of successful propaganda is the manner in which it creeps up on the unsuspecting reader or TV audience. It does that by means of throwaway remarks, expressing relatively fleeting between-the-lines thinking in reviews of books or films, or articles on practically anything. It is all around us, but take one example from the Harvard Business Review, in which its executive editor, Justin Fox, asks: “Why would Russian President Vladimir Putin push his country into a standoff with the West that is almost certain to hurt its economy?” My question to this author – one with sometimes quite apt economic analysis to his name – “how do you know that Putin is doing the pushing?” Fox quotes Daniel Drezner, and says it may be true that Putin “doesn’t care about the same things the West cares about” and is “perfectly happy to sacrifice economic growth for reputation and nationalist glory.” This kind of drivel is everywhere; it says that when dealing with Putin we are dealing with revanchism, with ambition to re-create the Soviet Union without communism, with macho fantasies, and a politician waylaid by totalitarian ambitions.

What makes propaganda effective is the manner in which, through its between-the-lines existence, it inserts itself into the brain as tacit knowledge. Our tacit understanding of things is by definition not focused, it helps us understand other things. The assumptions it entails are settled, no longer subject to discussion. Tacit knowledge is out of reach for new evidence or improved logical analysis. Bringing its assumptions back into focused consciousness is a tiresome process generally avoided with a sigh of “let’s move on”. Tacit knowledge is highly personal knowledge. It is obviously shared, since it has been derived from what is out there in the way of certainties adopted by society, but it has been turned into our very own knowledge, and therefore into something we are inclined to defend, if necessary with tooth and nail. Less curious minds feel they have a ‘right’ to its truth.

The propaganda that originates in Washington, and continues to be faithfully followed by institutions like the BBC and the vast majority of the European mainstream media, has made no room for the question whether the inhabitants of Donetsk and Lugansk have perhaps a perfectly good reason to be fighting a Russophobe regime with an anti-Russian language strategy that replaced the one they had voted for, a good enough reason to risk the bombings of their public buildings, hospitals and dwellings.

The propaganda line is one of simple Russian aggression. Putin has been fomenting the unrest in the Russian-speaking part of the Ukraine. Nowhere in the mainstream media have I seen reporting and images of the devastation wrought by Kiev troops, which eyewitnesses have compared to what the world was shown of Gaza. The implied opinions of CNN or BBC are taken at face value, the ‘social media’ quoted by a spokesperson for the State Department are taken at face value. All information that does not accord with this successful propaganda must be neutralized which can be done, for example, by labeling Russia Today as Moscow’s propaganda organ.

This dominant propaganda thrives because of Atlanticism, a European faith that holds that the world will not run properly if the United States is not accepted as its primary political conductor, and Europe should not get in America’s way. There is unsophisticated Atlanticism noticeable in the Netherlands, with voices on the radio expressing anguish about the Russian enemy at the gates, and there is sophisticated Atlanticism among defenders of NATO who can come up with a multitude of historical reasons for why it should continue to exist. The first is too silly for words, and the second can easily be rebutted. But one does not deal that easily with the intellectually most seductive kind of Atlanticism that comes with an appeal to reasonableness.

When an earlier wave of propaganda hit Europe 11 years ago, before the invasion of Iraq, sober scholars and commentators, appealing to reasonableness appeared from behind their desks in an effort to repair what was at that time a European crisis of confidence in the political wisdom of an American government. It was then that the principle of “without America it will not work” became enshrined. This Atlanticist tenet is quite understandable among a political elite that after more than half a century of relative safe comfort inside an alliance suddenly must begin contemplating the earlier taken-for-granted security of their own countries. But there was more to it than that. The invocation of a higher understanding of the Atlantic Alliance and the plea for renewed understandings to reinvigorate it, amounted to a poignant cry of decent friends who could not face the reality of their loss.

The hurt required ointment, and that was delivered in large dollops. Venerable European public intellectuals and highly placed officials sent joint open letters to George W. Bush, with urgent pleas to repair relations and formulas of how this might be achieved. On lower levels, editorial writers entered the action as proponents of reasonableness. Amid expressions of disgust with America’s new foreign policy, many wrote and spoke about the need to heal rifts, build bridges, renew mutual understanding, and so on. In the summer of 2003, the unambiguous opponents of a hasty invasion of Iraq appeared to be softening the sharp edges of their earlier positions. My favorite example, the Oxford historian and prolific commentator Timothy Garton Ash, widely viewed as the voice of reason, churned out articles and books overflowing with transatlantic balm. New possibilities were discovered, new leaves and pages were turned. It had “to come from both sides”, so ran the general tenor of these pleas and instructive editorials. Europe had to change as well! But how, in this context, remained unclear. There is no doubt that Europe should have changed. But in the context of American militarism that discussion ought to have revolved around the function of NATO, and its becoming a European liability, not around meeting the United States half-way. That did not happen and, as has been shown this past month, energies for European opposition to the propaganda in 2003 appear now to have dissipated almost completely.

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The notion that the Kiev controlled population have been given more democracy is of course ludicrous.

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Garton Ash: Seeing Anschluss in the Crimean referendum. The work of well paid scoundrels is never done. (click to enlarge)

Garton Ash is back at it again, writing in the Guardian of 1 August 2014, with the contention that “most western Europeans slept through Putin’s anschluss of Crimea”. ‘Anschluss’? Are we sinking to Hitler metaphors? He does not have to try very hard this time, not rising above the cliches of a newspaper editorial espousing the necessity of sanctions; importantly, he does not apologize this time for any possible American role in the crisis. The propaganda of this year is given a free reign, through an Atlanticist faith that was restored to greater strength by the fount of illusions that is the Obama presidency. It is tacit knowledge, requiring no special defense because it is what all reasonable people know to be reasonable.

Atlanticism is an affliction that blinds Europe. It does this so effectively that in every salon where the hot topics of today are discussed the ever present elephant is consistently left out of consideration. What I read in mainstream news and commentary about Ukraine is about Kiev and the ‘separatists’ and especially about Putin’s motives. The reason for this half-picture is clear, I think: Atlanticism demands the overlooking of the American factor in world events, except if that factor can be construed as positive. If that is not possible you avoid it. Another reason is simple ignorance. Not enough concerned and educated Dutch people appear to have traced the rise and influence of America’s neocons, or have an inkling that Samantha Power believes that Putin must be eliminated. They have no idea how the various institutions of American government relate to each other, and how much they lead lives of their own, without effective supervision of any central entity that is capable of developing a feasible foreign policy that makes sense for the United States itself.

Propaganda reduces everything to comic book simplicity. This has no room for subtleties, such as what will await the people under the government in Kiev as demands of the IMF are followed up. Think of Greece. It has no room for even the not-so-subtle frequently expressed desire by Putin that there ought to be diplomacy with an eye to achieving a kind of federal arrangement whereby East and West Ukraine remain within the same country, but have a significant amount of self government (something that may no longer be acceptable to the Easterners as Kiev goes on bombing them). Comic book imagery does not allow for the bad guys having good and reasonable ideas. And so the primary wish of Putin, the fundamental reason for his involvement in this crisis at all, that the Ukraine will not become part of NATO, cannot be part of the pictures. The rather obvious and only acceptable condition, and one predictably insisted on by any Russian president who wants to stay in power, is a nonaligned neutral Ukraine.

The instigators of the Ukraine crisis work from desks in Washington. They have designed a shift in American attitudes toward Russia with a decision to turn it into (their language) “a pariah state”. Leading up to the February coup they helped anti-Russian, and rightwing forces hijack a protest movement demanding more democracy. The notion that the Kiev controlled population have been given more democracy is of course ludicrous.

There are serious writers on Russia who have become morally indignant and angry with developments in Russian life in recent years under Putin. This is a different subject from the Ukraine crisis, but their influence helps inform lots of propaganda. Ben Judah, who wrote the abovementioned NY Times oped is a good example. I think I understand their indignation, and I sympathize with them to some extent. I’m familiar with this phenomenon as I’ve seen it often enough among journalists writing about China or even Japan. In the case of China and Russia their indignation is prompted by an accumulation of things that in their eyes have gone entirely wrong because of measures by the authorities that appear to be regressive and diverging from what they were supposed to be doing in consonance with liberal ideas. This indignation can overwhelm everything else. It becomes a mist through which these authors cannot discern how powerholders try to cope with dire situations. In the case of Russia there appears to have been little attention recently to the fact that when Putin inherited a Russia to rule, he inherited a state that was no longer functioning as one, and that demanded first of all a reconcentration of power at the center. Russia was economically ruined under Yeltsin, helped by numerous Western predatory interests and misguided market fundamentalists from Harvard. After abolishing communism, they were seduced to try an instantaneous switch to American style capitalism, while there were no institutions whatsoever to underpin such a thing. They privatized the huge state-owned industries without having a private sector; something you cannot quickly create out of nothing, as is vividly shown by Japanese history. So what they got was kleptocratic capitalism, with stolen state assets, which gave birth to the notorious oligarchs. It as good as destroyed the relatively stable Russian middle class, and made Russian life expectancy plummet.

Of course Putin wants to curtail foreign NGOs. They can do lots of damage by destabilizing his government. Foreign-funded think tanks do not exist for thinking, but for peddling policies in line with the beliefs of the funders that they, not wanting to learn from recent experience, dogmatically assume are good for anyone at any time. It is a subject that at best very tangentially belongs to the current Ukraine story, but it has prepared the intellectual soil for the prevailing propaganda.

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Russia was economically ruined under Yeltsin, helped by numerous Western predatory interests and misguided market fundamentalists from Harvard. 

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Does what I have said make me a Putin fan? I do not know him, and know not enough about him. When I try to remedy this with recent literature, I cannot avoid the impression that I have to wade through a great deal of vilification, and in the mainstream media I see no serious attempt to figure out what Putin may be trying to achieve, except for the nonsense about re-establishing a Russian empire. There has been no evidence at all of imperialist ambitions or the fact that he had his sights set on the Crimea before the coup, and before the NATO ambitions of the Russophobes who came out on top, endangered the Russian naval base there.

Does what I have said make me anti-American? Being accorded that label is almost inevitable, I suppose. I think that the United States is living through a seemingly endless tragedy (albeit nothing comparable to the tragedy it imposes on counties other human beings—Eds). And I am deeply sympathetic to those concerned Americans, among them many of my friends, who must wrestle with this.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karel van Wolferen (born 1941, Rotterdam) is a Dutch journalist, writer and professor, who is particularly recognised for his knowledge of Japanese politics, economics, history and culture.^[1][2]

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02 October 2014

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The Comic Book Simplicity Of Propaganda

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The second Media Lens book, ‘NEWSPEAK in the 21st Century’ by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2009 by Pluto Press. John Pilger writes of the book:

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In September 2012, Zero Books published ‘Why Are We The Good Guys?’ by David Cromwell. Mark Curtis, author of ‘Web of Deceit’ and ‘Unpeople’, says:

‘This book is truly essential reading, focusing on one of the key issues, if not THE issue, of our age: how to recognise the deep, everyday brainwashing to which we are subjected, and how to escape from it. This book brilliantly exposes the extent of media disinformation, and does so in a compelling and engaging way.’