From the Chagos Islands to Pakistan, innocent civilians are pawns to America, backed by Britain. In our compliant political culture, this deadly game seldom speaks its name.

Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people`s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos Islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in theIndian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in phenomenal natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, “Keep smiling, girls!”

Sitting in her kitchen inMauritiusmany years later, she said: “I didn`t have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That`s why they couldn`t legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving, [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs.”

In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand fromWashingtonthat the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be “swept” and “sanitised” of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. “They knew we were inseparable from our pets,” said Lisette. “When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks` exhausts. You could hear them crying.”

Lisette, her family and hundreds of the other islanders were forced on to a rusting steamer bound forMauritius, a journey of a thousand miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser – bird shit. The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two of the women on board miscarried.

Dumped on the docks atPort Louis, Lisette`s youngest children, Jollice and Regis, died within a week of each other. “They died of sadness,” she said. “They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home for ever. The doctor inMauritiussaid he could not treat sadness.”

This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading “Maintaining the Fiction”, the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by “reclassifying” the population as “floating” and to “make up the rules as we go along”. Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court says the “deportation or forcible transfer of population” is a crime against humanity. ThatBritainhad committed such a crime – in exchange for a $14m discount off a US Polaris nuclear submarine – was not on the agenda of a group of British “defence” correspondents flown to the Chagos by the Ministry of Defence when theUSbase was completed. “There is nothing in our files,” said the MoD, “about inhabitants or an evacuation.”

Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America`s and Britain`s war on democracy. The heaviest bombing ofIraqandAfghanistanwas launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders` abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the “bunker-busting” bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets on two continents; an attack onIranwill start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style prison for its “rendition” victims and called itCampJustice.Wipe-out

What was done to Lisette`s paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole political culture behind its democratic façade, and the scale of our own indoctrination in its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis”. Longer and bloodier than any other war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, “It never happened . . . Even while it was happening it wasn`t happening.” Last July, the American historian William Blum published his updated “summary of the charming record ofUSforeign policy”. Since the Second World War, theUnited Stateshas:

1) Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically elected.

2) Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.

3) Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.

4) Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.

5) Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, theUnited Stateshas carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases,Britainhas been a collaborator. The “enemy” changes in name – from communism to Islamism – but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power, or a society occupying strategically useful territory and deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world`s most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – western terrorism – are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed byBritainandAmericais of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to the 11 September 2001 attacks, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy (in “Operation Cyclone”) is known to specialists, but otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture inBritainandAmericaimmerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed “our man” by Margaret Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered in what the CIA described as “the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century”. This estimate does not include the third of the population ofEast Timorwho were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine-guns.

These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of uncoercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of advertising to soundbites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.

It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. “For almost the first time in two centuries,” wrote Terry Eagleton, “there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life.” No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that “disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man`s original virtue”. And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in “American Football”:

Hallelujah.

Praise the Lord for all good things . . .

We blew their balls into shards of dust,

Into shards of fucking dust . . .

Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama`s drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region ofPakistan, orSomalia, orYemen, the American controllers sitting in front of their computer-game screens type in “Bugsplat”. Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Pre­dator drone attacks onPakistanthat killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.

Remember the tear-stained headlines as Brand Obama was elected: “Momentous, spine-tingling” (the Guardian). “The American future,” Simon Schama wrote, “is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed with anticipation.” The San Francisco Chronicle saw a spiritual “Lightworker . . . who can . . . usher in a new way of being on the planet”. Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place inWashington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America`s corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations againstChina, America`s largest creditor and the new “enemy” inAsia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia,Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long-planned attacks onSyriaandIranbeckon a world war.Israel, the exemplar ofUSviolence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3bn together with Obama`s permission to steal more Palestinian land.

Surveillance state

Obama`s most “historic” achievement is to bring the war on democracy home toAmerica. On New Year`s Eve, he signed the National Defence Authorisation Act, a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens secretly and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only “associate” with those “belligerent” to theUS. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeas corpus (the right to due process of law) and, in effect, repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.

On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to “secure territory and populations” overseas but to fight in the “homeland” and “support [the] civil authorities”. In other words, US troops are to be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inev­itable civil unrest takes hold.

Americais now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons – the consequence of a “market” extremism that, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14trn in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young, jobless, homeless, incarcerated African Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will feature “a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy”. This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of theAtlanticis to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.

The same shadow is acrossBritainand much ofEurope, where social democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank dictators. In David Cameron`s “big society”, the theft of £84bn in jobs and services exceeds even the amount of tax “legally” avoided by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but with a cowardly liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen and which, as Hywel Williams wrote following the 9/11 attacks, “can itself be a form of self-righteous fanaticism”. Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claimed to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain created a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain in order to “protect the intelligence agencies” – the torturers.

This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos Islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in the streets ofPort LouisandLondon. “Only when you take direct action, face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed,” Lisette said. “And the smaller you are, the greater your example to others.” Such is the eloquent answer to those who still ask, “What can I do?”

I last saw Lisette`s tiny figure standing in driving rain next to her comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow.

© 2012, New Statesman

Latin America: the attack on democracy John Pilger New Statesman April 28, 2008

John Pilger argues that an unreported war is being waged by the US to restore power to the privileged classes at the expense of the poor

Beyond the sound and fury of its conquest ofIraq and campaign againstIran, the world`s dominant power is waging a largely unreported war on another continent -Latin America. Using proxies,Washington aims to restore and reinforce the political control of a privileged group calling itself middle-class, to shift the responsibility for massacres and drug trafficking away from the psychotic regime inColombia and its mafiosi, and to extinguish hopes raised among Latin America`s impoverished majority by the reform governments ofVenezuela,Ecuador andBolivia.

In Colombia, the main battleground, the class nature of the war is distorted by the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the Farc, whose own resort to kidnapping and the drugs trade has provided an instrument with which to smear those who have distinguished Latin America`s epic history of rebellion by opposing the proto-fascism of George W Bush`s regime. “You don`t fight terror with terror,” said President Hugo Chávez as US warplanes bombed to death thousands of civilians inAfghanistanfollowing the 11 September 2001 attacks. Thereafter, he was a marked man. Yet, as every poll has shown, he spoke for the great majority of human beings who have grasped that the “war on terror” is a crusade of domination. Almost alone among national leaders standing up to Bush, Chávez was declared an enemy and his plans for a functioning social democracy independent of the United States a threat to Washington`s grip on Latin America. “Even worse,” wrote the Latin America specialist James Petras, “Chávez`s nationalist policies represented an alternative in Latin America at a time (2000-2003) when mass insurrections, popular uprisings and the collapse of pro-US client rulers (Argentina,EcuadorandBolivia) were constant front-page news.”

It is impossible to underestimate the threat of this alternative as perceived by the “middle classes” in countries which have an abundance of privilege and poverty. InVenezuela, their “grotesque fantasies of being ruled by a `brutal communist dictator`”, to quote Petras, are reminiscent of the paranoia of the white population that backed South Africa`s apartheid regime. Like inSouth Africa, racism inVenezuelais rampant, with the poor ignored, despised or patronised, and aCaracasshock jock allowed casually to dismiss Chávez, who is of mixed race, as a “monkey”. This fatuous venom has come not only from the super-rich behind their walls in suburbs called Country Club, but from the pretenders to their ranks in middle-level management, journalism, public relations, the arts, education and the other professions, who identify vicariously with all things American. Journalists in broadcasting and the press have played a crucial role – acknowledged by one of the generals and bankers who tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Chávez in 2002. “We couldn`t have done it without them,” he said. “The media were our secret weapon.”

Many of these people regard themselves as liberals, and have the ear of foreign journalists who like to describe themselves as being “on the left”. This is not surprising. When Chávez was first elected in 1998,Venezuelawas not an archetypical Latin American tyranny, but a liberal democracy with certain freedoms, run by and for its elite, which had plundered the oil revenue and let crumbs fall to the invisible millions in the barrios. A pact between the two main parties, known as puntofijismo, resembled the convergence of new Labour and the Tories inBritainand Republicans and Democrats in theUS. For them, the idea of popular sovereignty was anathema, and still is.

Take higher education. At the taxpayer-funded elite “public”VenezuelanCentralUniversity, more than 90 per cent of the students come from the upper and “middle” classes. These and other elite students have been infiltrated by CIA-linked groups and, in defending their privilege, have been lauded by foreign liberals.

WithColombiaas its front line, the war on democracy inLatin Americahas Chávez as its main target. It is not difficult to understand why. One of Chávez`s first acts was to revitalise the oil producers` organisation Opec and force the oil price to record levels. At the same time he reduced the price of oil for the poorest countries in the Caribbean region and central America, and used Venezuela`s new wealth to pay off debt, notably Argentina`s, and, in effect, expelled the International Monetary Fund from a continent over which it once ruled. He has cut poverty by half – while GDP has risen dramatically. Above all, he gave poor people the confidence to believe that their lives would improve.

The irony is that, unlike Fidel Castro inCuba, he presented no real threat to the well-off, who have grown richer under his presidency. What he has demonstrated is that a social democracy can prosper and reach out to its poor with genuine welfare, and without the extremes of “neo liberalism” – a decidedly unradical notion once embraced by the British Labour Party. Those ordinary Vene zuelans who abstained during last year`s constitutional referendum were protesting that a “moderate” social democracy was not enough while the bureaucrats remained corrupt and the sewers overflowed.

Across the border inColombia, theUShas made Venezuela`s neighbour the Israel of Latin America. Under “Plan Colombia”, more than $6bn in arms, planes, special forces, mercenaries and logistics have been showered on some of the most murderous people on earth: the inheritors of Pinochet`s Chile and the other juntas that terrorised Latin America for a generation, their various gestapos trained at the School of the Americas in Georgia. “We not only taught them how to torture,” a former American trainer told me, “we taught them how to kill, murder, eliminate.” That remains true ofColombia, where government-inspired mass terror has been documented by Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and many others. In a study of 31,656 extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances between 1996 and 2006, the Colombian Commission of Jurists found that 46 per cent had been murdered by right-wing death squads and 14 per cent by Farc guerrillas. The para militaries were responsible for most of the three million victims of internal displacement. This misery is a product of Plan Colombia`s pseudo “war on drugs”, whose real purpose has been to eliminate the Farc. To that goal has now been added a war of attrition on the new popular democracies, especiallyVenezuela.

USspecial forces “advise” the Colombian military to cross the border intoVenezuelaand murder and kidnap its citizens and infiltrate paramilitaries, and so test the loyalty of the Venezuelan armed forces. The model is the CIA-run Contra campaign inHondurasin the 1980s that brought down the reformist government inNicaragua. The defeat of the Farc is now seen as a prelude to an all-out attack onVenezuelaif the Vene zuelan elite – reinvigorated by its narrow referendum victory last year – broadens its base in state and local government elections in November.

America`s man and Colombia`s Pinochet is President Álvaro Uribe. In 1991, a declassified report by the US Defence Intelligence Agency revealed the then Senator Uribe as having “worked for the Medellín Cartel” as a “close personal friend” of the cartel`s drugs baron, Pablo Escobar. To date, 62 of his political allies have been investigated for close collaboration with paramilitaries. A feature of his rule has been the fate of journalists who have illuminated his shadows. Last year, four leading journalists received death threats after criticising Uribe. Since 2002, at least 31 journalists have been assassinated inColombia. Uribe`s other habit is smearing trade unions and human rights workers as “collaborators with the Farc”. This marks them. Colombia`s death squads, wrote Jenny Pearce, author of the acclaimed Under the Eagle: US Intervention in Central America and the Caribbean (1982), “are increasingly active, confident that the president has been so successful in rallying the country against the Farc that little attention will shift to their atrocities”.

Uribe was personally championed by Tony Blair, reflecting Britain`s long-standing, mostly secret role in Latin America. “Counter-insurgency assistance” to the Colombian military, up to its neck in death-squad alliances, includes training by the SAS of units such as the High Mountain Battalions, condemned repeatedly for atrocities. On 8 March, Colombian officers were invited by the Foreign Office to a “counter-insurgency seminar” at theWiltonParkconference centre in southernEngland. Rarely has the Foreign Office so brazenly paraded the killers it mentors.

The western media`s role follows earlier models, such as the campaigns that cleared the way for the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the credibility given to lies about Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction. The softening-up for an attack onVenezuelais well under way, with the repetition of similar lies and smears.

Cocaine trail

On 3 February, the Observer devoted two pages to claims that Chávez was colluding in the Colombian drugs trade. Similarly to the paper`s notorious bogus scares linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda, the Observer`s headline read, “Revealed: Chávez role in cocaine trail to Europe”. Allegations were unsubstantiated; hearsay uncorroborated. No source was identified. Indeed, the reporter, clearly trying to cover himself, wrote: “No source I spoke to accused Chávez himself of having a direct role in Colombia`s giant drug trafficking business.”

In fact, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has reported thatVenezuelais fully participating in international anti-drugs programmes and in 2005 seized the third-highest amount of cocaine in the world. Even the Foreign Office minister Kim Howells has referred to “Venezuela`s tre mendous co-operation”.

The drugs smear has recently been reinforced with reports that Chávez has an “increasingly public alliance [with] the Farc” (see “Dangerous liaisons”, New Statesman, 14 April). Again, there is “no evidence”, says the secretary general of the Organisation of American States. At Uribe`s request, and backed by the French government, Chávez played a mediating role in seeking the release of hostages held by the Farc. On 1 March, the negotiations were betrayed by Uribe who, with US logistical assistance, fired missiles at a camp in Ecuador, killing Raú Reyes, the Farc`s highest-level negotiator. An “email” recovered from Reyes`s laptop is said by the Colombian military to show that the Farc has received $300m from Chávez. The allegation is fake. The actual document refers only to Chávez in relation to the hostage exchange. And on 14 April, Chávez angrily criticised the Farc. “If I were a guerrilla,” he said, “I wouldn`t have the need to hold a woman, a man who aren`t soldiers. Free the civilians!”

However, these fantasies have lethal purpose. On 10 March, the Bush administration announced that it had begun the process of placing Venezuela`s popular democracy on a list of “terrorist states”, along with North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Sudan and Iran, the last of which is currently awaiting attack by the world`s leading terrorist state.

© 2008, New Statesman