The widow of a US military personnel who committed suicide after seven tours of duty in West Asia has confronted former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, “whose lies led my husband to join the military, and so many other soldiers”.
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World-renowned political dissident and linguist, Noam Chomsky, speaking at the 25th anniversary of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, courtesy of Democracy NOW!
Many Malaysians have expressed disappointment over the BBC’s backing down from a ‘HARDtalk’ interview with RPK.
Much of this sentiment, I believe, stems from a perception that the BBC is a bastion of impartial, independent reporting.
Far from it. The BBC reflects the establishment viewpoint in the UK. Its positions on the illegal invasion of Iraq, the US-UK role in Afghanistan and the Israeli occupation of Palestine are well documented. Continue reading »
What has the US-led Invasion and Occupation of Iraq really achieved? What have the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of American troops really accomplished?
If you ask me, a lot of people made a lot of money out of this military adventure – that’s what it has accomplished. Yes, war is all about Big Business for a few: the oil price rockets up, military budgets are pumped up, weapons sales soar, strategic oil pipelines are laid, funds for dubious “reconstruction” are siphoned off and a few favoured corporations reap huge profits for their well-connected share-holders.
Leila Fadel of McClatchy reports:
I couldn’t understand what thousands of American soldiers had died for and why hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed. I didn’t see a budding democracy in an Iraqi government that was more like Saddam Hussein’s every day. I didn’t see a land long divided by sect, ethnicity, tribe and class beginning to grow into a united nation.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
- Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize winner for Literature, 2005 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Harold Pinter, who passed away on Christmas Eve, was well known for his plays. But the corporate media have downplayed his role as one of the most prominent opponents of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.
His words on how politicians and the mainstream media often try to blank out monumental or historic events from the public consciousness have relevance for us in Malaysia, where official news reports are often at sharp odds with what really happened. Politicians, he observed, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. “To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives.”
“Sometimes,” he asserted, “a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.”
This was Pinter’s Nobel lecture:
In 1958 I wrote the following:
‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’
I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?