17 March 2011 By
John Pilger Shortly after the
invasion of Iraq in 2003, I interviewed Ray McGovern,
one of an elite group of CIA officers who prepared the
President's daily intelligence brief. McGovern was at
the apex of the "national security" monolith that is
American power and had retired with presidential
plaudits. On the eve of the invasion, he and 45 other
senior officers of the CIA and other intelligence
agencies wrote to President George W. Bush that the
"drumbeat for war" was based not on intelligence, but
lies. "It was 95 per cent
charade," McGovern told me. "How did they get away
with it?" "The press allowed the
crazies to get away with it." "Who are the crazies?" "The people running
the [Bush] administration have a set of beliefs a lot
like those expressed in Mein Kampf... these are the
same people who were referred to in the circles in
which I moved, at the top, as ‘the crazies'." I said, "Norman Mailer
has written that that he believes America has entered
a pre-fascist state. What's your view of that?" "Well... I hope he's
right, because there are others saying we are already
in a fascist mode." On 22 January, Ray
McGovern emailed me to express his disgust at the
Obama administration's barbaric treatment of the
alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning and its pursuit
of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. "Way back when
George and Tony decided it might be fun to attack
Iraq," he wrote, "I said something to the effect that
fascism had already begun here. I have to admit I did
not think it would get this bad this quickly." On 16 February,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech at
George Washington University in which she condemned
governments that arrested protestors and crushed free
expression. She lauded the liberating power of the
internet while failing to mention that her government
was planning to close down those parts of the internet
that encouraged dissent and truth-telling. It was a
speech of spectacular hypocrisy, and Ray McGovern was
in the audience. Outraged, he rose from his chair and
silently turned his back on Clinton. He was
immediately seized by police and a security goon and
beaten to the floor, dragged out and thrown into jail,
bleeding. He has sent me photographs of his injuries.
He is 71. During the assault, which was clearly
visible to Clinton, she did not pause in her remarks. Fascism is a difficult
word, because it comes with an iconography that
touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda
against America's official enemies and to promote the
West's foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary
written in the struggle against Hitler. And yet
fascism and imperialism are twins. In the aftermath of
world war two, those in the imperial states who had
made respectable the racial and cultural superiority
of "western civilisation", found that Hitler and
fascism had claimed the same, employing strikingly
similar methods. Thereafter, the very notion of
American imperialism was swept from the textbooks and
popular culture of an imperial nation forged on the
genocidal conquest of its native people. And a war on
social justice and democracy became "US foreign
policy". As the Washington
historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the
US has destroyed or subverted more than 50
governments, many of them democracies, and used mass
murderers like Suharto, Mobutu and Pinochet to
dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, every
dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by
America. In "Operation Cyclone", the CIA and MI6
secretly fostered and bank-rolled Islamic extremism.
The object was to smash or deter nationalism and
democracy. The victims of this western state terrorism
have been mostly Muslims. The courageous people gunned
down last week in Bahrain and Libya, the latter a
"priority UK market", according to Britain's official
arms "procurers", join those children blown to bits in
Gaza by the latest American F-16 aircraft. The revolt in the Arab
world is not merely against a resident dictator but a
worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury
and imposed by the US Agency for International
Development, the IMF and World Bank, which have
ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to
vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less
than $2 a day. The people's triumph in Cairo was the
first blow against what Benito Mussolini called
corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of
fascism. How did such extremism
take hold in the liberal West? "It is necessary to
destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for
the poor and oppressed," observed Noam Chomsky a
generation ago, "[and] to replace these dangerous
feelings with self-centred egoism, a pervasive
cynicism that holds that [an order of] inequities and
oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact,
a great international propaganda campaign is under way
to convince people – particularly young people – that
this not only is what they should feel but that it's
what they do feel." Like the European
revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism
in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An
insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity
has begun. In the United States, where 45 per cent of
young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge
fund managers are paid, on average, a billion dollars
a year, mass protests against cuts in services and
jobs have spread to heartland states like Wisconsin.
In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest
movement, UK Uncut, is about to take direct action
against tax avoiders and rapacious banks. Something
has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a
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