The new Quisling

A Perennial Conflict of Interests

The miserable careerist and Atlanticist, Gordon Brown-nose-Bush, Prime Minister of the UK by the decree of erstwhile autocrat, the Bliar, visits his Führer in Washington and swears that "no quarter shall be given in the continuing battle against terror." Almost in the same breath he commits a pissed-off nation, Britain, to "even closer ties" with the new, totalitarian USA.

What is it about Brown-nose that nauseates me every time I see his picture or hear about his latest arse-licking of the madman in the White House?

Some of Brown-nose's close associates describes him as a Stalin, intolerant of anyone who crosses him. Now we can see how this Stalin works: not by prattling on in badly-formed sentences and non sequitor as did his predecessor but simply by quietly getting on with the job he sees to be done.

Despite his name, Brown-nose is essentially a grey, Ahrimanic bureaucrat with a grey, Ahrimanic vision of the future. His job is to finish off what the Bliar started in turning Britain into a full-blown police state while at the same time tying us even tighter in a strangle-hold, Anglo-Saxon death-pact with Amerikka.

Even the mild-mannered Mikhael Gorbachev has now been drawn to comment:

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev accused the United Kingdom's government of creating problems for itself by trying to please only the United States at the expense of other partners.

Discussing the ongoing row between the U.K. and Russia over Moscow's refusal to extradite a murder suspect, Gorbachev said the British leadership "is trying to be a good partner only for the United States, and often ends up in situations for which it later finds it difficult to justify itself to its people."

What Gorby leaves out is why this should be happening.

The financial ties between British and US capital remain as strong as they have ever been. Why else would a distant America have allowed itself, twice, to be drawn into world war in order to save the Brits' bacon? The second time around the conditions laid down by Washington were that the British Empire would be subsumed into a new, American Empire and that the British government would become America's mercenary abroad. From the time of the Korean War this has proved to be so.

And what we hear coming out of the mouths of quislings like the Bliar and Brown-nose are the words of mercenaries who are so committed to pan-Atlantic capitalism that they will gladly sacrifice their people in that interest as did their predecessors who sent out the proles into the trenches in two killing sprees.

For it is always Capital who wins in war.

In his book, Vodka Cola, Charles Levinson describes how the US corporation, General Motors, contributed simultaneously to the war efforts of both the Allies and the Third Reich: in Britain as Vauxhall Motors, a GM subsidiary, and in Germany as Opel, also a GM subsidiary. After the war, GM successfully sued the US Government for reparations against the damage bombers, also built by GM, had wreaked on the Opel factories in Germany!

That is just one example of the Catch-22 of Capital's rules of the game. Levinson's book goes on to describe how similar double-dealing went on between the USA and the USSR right through the Cold War. "We are above petty national squabbles," declares a grand master of Capital, quoted by Levinson.

Nothing has changed, only moved on apace. The New World Order is in the making and its servants, Bushtler and Gordon Brown-nose, are simply helping to put together its building blocks. In that process both the Soviet Union and China have no place. The NWO is to remain predominantly Anglo-Saxon with the Mexicans added as cheap labour through the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA).

Brown-nose's job, no doubt, will be to steer Britain ever closer to NAFTA while at the same time trying to persuade the European Union free access to NAFTA into the European markets. To do so, he will rely on Merkel and Sarkozy who, though, will find themselves torn between the US and Russia, their more obvious trading partner. That is why the mild-mannered Gorbachev is quoted by Russia's news agencies over the recent cold-war initiatives taken by the Brown-nose regime on behalf of the USA:

"Russia sees this, and cannot encourage such an approach, but is ready to constructively resolve current problems," he told journalists in Moscow.

Gorbachev, 76, called for dialogue between Russian and British politicians to overcome the dispute.

"Our politicians should not be drawn into sharp statements, they need to bear in mind that Russia and Britain are linked by important ties ..."

This was only a mild ticking-off. If the cowardly minions led by Brown-nose choose to ignore it, things will get increasingly difficult for a Britain which is becoming heavily-dependent on Russia for energy supplies.

Gorbachev's observations underscore what lesser commentators, including myself, have been saying all along: British capital must choose between the traditional Anglo-Saxon Alliance with North America (and now NAFTA) or throw in its lot with the European Union and Russia. Clearly, it doesn't want to do that, hoping some kind of mutual pact can be obtained between NAFTA and Europe.

Brown-nose will use all his experience to try and bring this about. It's unlikely that he will succeed. Meantime, it will be the proles of that diabolic creation, the United Kingdom, who will continue to suffer as the mercenary UK's military spending will increase at the cost of its domestic needs.

Nothing's changed. After all, was there ever a time when the interests of the British people moved their politicians to serve on their behalf and not Capital's?

How Truth Slips Down the Memory Hole

by John Pilger, from Anti-War.com

One of the leaders of demonstrations in Gaza calling for the release of the BBC reporter Alan Johnston was a Palestinian news cameraman, Imad Ghanem. On 5 July, he was shot by Israeli soldiers as he filmed them invading Gaza. A Reuters video shows bullets hitting his body as he lay on the ground. An ambulance trying to reach him was also attacked. The Israelis described him as a "legitimate target." The International Federation of Journalists called the shooting "a vicious and brutal example of deliberate targeting of a journalist." At the age of 21, he has had both legs amputated. Dr. David Halpin, a British trauma surgeon who works with Palestinian children, emailed the BBC's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. "The BBC should report the alleged details about the shooting," he wrote. "It should honor Alan [Johnston] as a journalist by reporting the facts, uncomfortable as they might be to Israel." He received no reply. The atrocity was reported in two sentences on the BBC online. Along with 11 Palestinian civilians killed by the Israelis on the same day, Alan Johnston's now legless champion slipped into what George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four called the memory hole. (It was Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth to make disappear all facts embarrassing to Big Brother.) While Alan Johnston was being held, I was asked by the BBC World Service if I would say a few words of support for him. I readily agreed, and suggested I also mention the thousands of Palestinians abducted and held hostage. The answer was a polite no; and all the other hostages remained in the memory hole. Or, as Harold Pinter wrote of such unmentionables: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened... It didn't matter. It was of no interest." The media wailing over the BBC's royal photo-shoot fiasco and assorted misdemeanors provide the perfect straw man. They complement a self-serving BBC internal inquiry into news bias, which dutifully supplied the right-wing Daily Mail with hoary grist that the corporation is a left-wing plot. Such shenanigans would be funny were it not for the true story behind the facade of elite propaganda that presents humanity as useful or expendable, worthy or unworthy, and the Middle East as the Anglo-American crime that never happened, didn't matter, was of no interest. The other day, I turned on the BBC's Radio 4 and heard a cut-glass voice announce a program about Iraqi interpreters working for "the British coalition forces" and warning that "listeners might find certain descriptions of violence disturbing." Not a word referred to those of "us" directly and ultimately responsible for the violence. The program was called Face the Facts. Is satire that dead? Not yet. The Murdoch columnist David Aaronovitch, a warmonger, is to interview Blair in the BBC's "major retrospective" of the sociopath's rule. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four lexicon of opposites pervades almost everything we see, hear and read now. The invaders and destroyers are "the British coalition forces," surely as benign as that British institution, St. John Ambulance, who are "bringing democracy" to Iraq. BBC television describes Israel as having "two hostile Palestinian entities on its borders," neatly inverting the truth that Israel is actually inside Palestinian borders. A study by Glasgow University says that young British viewers of TV news believe Israelis illegally colonizing Palestinian land are Palestinians: the victims are the invaders. "The great crimes against most of humanity," wrote the American cultural critic James Petras, "are justified by a corrosive debasement of language and thought... [that] have fabricated a linguistic world of terror, of demons and saviors, of axes of good and evil, of euphemisms" designed to disguise a state terror that is "a gross perversion" of democracy, liberation, reform, justice. In his reinauguration speech, George Bush mentioned all these words, whose meaning, for him, is the dictionary opposite. It is 80 years since Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, predicted a pervasive "invisible government" of corporate spin, suppression and silence as the true ruling power in the United States. That is true today on both sides of the Atlantic. How else could America and Britain go on such a spree of death and mayhem on the basis of stupendous lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, even a "mushroom cloud over New York"? When the BBC radio reporter Andrew Gilligan reported the truth, he was pilloried and sacked along with the BBC's director general, while Blair, the proven liar, was protected by the liberal wing of the media and given a standing ovation in parliament. The same is happening again over Iran, distracted, it is hoped, by spin that the new Foreign Secretary David Miliband is a "skeptic" about the crime in Iraq when, in fact, he has been an accomplice, and by unctuous Kennedy-quoting Foreign Office propaganda about Miliband's "new world order." "What do you think of Iran's complicity in attacks on British soldiers in Basra?" Miliband was asked by the Financial Times. Miliband: "Well, I think that any evidence of Iranian engagement there is to be deplored. I think that we need regional players to be supporting stability, not fomenting discord, never mind death..." FT: "Just to be clear, there is evidence?" Miliband: "Well no, I chose my words carefully..." The coming war on Iran, including the possibility of a nuclear attack, has already begun as a war by journalism. Count the number of times "nuclear weapons program" and "nuclear threat" are spoken and written, yet neither exists, says the International Atomic Energy Agency. On 21 June, the New York Times went further and advertised an "urgent" poll, headed: "Should we bomb Iran?" The questions beneath referred to Iran being "a greater threat than Saddam Hussein" and asked: "Who should undertake military action against Iran first... ?" The choice was "US. Israel. Neither country." So tick your favorite bombers. The last British war to be fought without censorship and "embedded" journalists was the Crimea a century and a half ago. The bloodbath of the First World War and the Cold War might never have happened without their unpaid (and paid) propagandists. Today's invisible government is no less served, especially by those who censor by omission. However, there are major differences. Official disinformation now is often aimed at a critical public intelligence, a growing awareness in spite of the media. This "threat" from a public often held in contempt has been met by the insidious transfer of much of journalism to public relations. Some years ago, PR Week estimated that the amount of "PR-generated material" in the media is "50 per cent in a broadsheet newspaper in every section apart from sport. In the local press and the mid-market and tabloid nationals, the figure would undoubtedly be higher. Music and fashion journalists and PRs work hand in hand in the editorial process... PRs provide fodder, but the clever high-powered ones do a lot of the journalists' thinking for them." This is known today as "perception management." The most powerful are not the Max Cliffords but huge corporations such as Hill & Knowlton, which "sold" the slaughter known as the first Gulf war, and the Sawyer Miller Group, which sold hated, pro-Washington regimes in Colombia and Bolivia and whose operatives included Mark Malloch Brown, the new Foreign Office minister, currently being spun as anti-Washington. Hundreds of millions of dollars go to corporations spinning the carnage in Iraq as a sectarian war and covering up the truth: that an atrocious invasion is pinned down by a successful resistance while the oil is looted. The other major difference today is the abdication of cultural forces that once provided dissent outside journalism. Their silence has been devastating. "For almost the first time in two centuries," wrote the literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." The lone, honorable exception is Harold Pinter. Eagleton listed writers and playwrights who once promised dissent and satire and instead became rich celebrities, ending the legacy of Shelley and Blake, Carlyle and Ruskin, Morris and Wilde, Wells and Shaw. He singled out Martin Amis, a writer given tombstones of column inches in which to air his pretensions, along with his attacks on Muslims. The following is from a recent article by Amis: Tony strolled over [to me] and said, "What have you been up to today?" "I've been feeling protective of my prime minister, since you ask." For some reason our acquaintanceship, at least on my part, is becoming mildly but deplorably flirtatious. What these elite, embedded voices share is their participation in an essentially class war, the long war of the rich against the poor. That they play their part in a broadcasting studio or in the clubbable pages of the review sections and that they think of themselves as liberals or conservatives is neither here nor there. They belong to the same crusade, waging the same battle for their enduring privilege. In The Serpent, Marc Karlin's dreamlike film about Rupert Murdoch, the narrator describes how easily Murdochism came to dominate the media and coerce the industry's liberal elite. There are clips from a keynote address that Murdoch gave at the Edinburgh Television Festival. The camera pans across the audience of TV executives, who listen in respectful silence as Murdoch flagellates them for suppressing the true voice of the people. They then applaud him. "This is the silence of the democrats," says the voice-over, "and the Dark Prince could bathe in their silence."

The BBC's Deceit and Lies to Continue

Listening to all the chest-beating currently emanating from a self-obsessed BBC anyone would think that nothing less than a revolution in broadcasting was going on. The BBC must not deceive the audience we are told by its Director General, Mark Thompson. In future, any programme makers who deceive the public will be shown the door, he promises.

And BBC staff are going to be trained in how to be honest!

Hurrah, at last the message has got through, you may think. The BBC is going to try to be objective about news reporting!

Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. Truth and a promise not to deceive concerns the BBC's phone-in programmes and how it reports on Mrs Windsor Marm. In no way will it affect the lying-machine which is the BBC News.

BBC reporter, Nick Highams, commented on how the public might feel that the BBC holds its audiences in contempt. This hasn't happened, he reassures us, and we must prevent it from happening.

Bollocks.

The manner in which this miserable organization, totally dependent on a licence-fee which the population is forced to pay, treats us its audience is nothing but contemptuous. The BBC is a conduit of State propaganda and in principle no different to any other, including those in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The only difference is in its veneer of totally false British, middle-class gentility.

The BBC's deceit and lies will continue and its apparatchiks will grow fatter at the public's expense.

A Look in the Mirror
Read it here and here

First There Was an Earthquake, then There Was no Earthquake
Monday, July 16th, 2007 will not be a date that will live in infamy. Not at least within the marbled corridors and high haunts of the British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) editorial board.

FEAR HYPE: Recycled terrorism hysteria
from MEDIA HELL

We were first alerted to a scaremongering BBC news report by its trailer. Shown an hour or so before the BBC1 Ten O'Clock News (23/1/07), the trailer boasted that the news would be featuring dramatic images of an alleged terrorist bombing plot.

This was indeed the headline story of the Ten O'Clock News, which began with the following announcement:

"Dramatic new images of the moment an alleged suicide bomber tried to blow up a train. [The images are shown together with the dramatic introductory music to the news] He's challenged by an off-duty fireman as a mother and young baby look on. Panic as the carriage empties within seconds, but a few passengers give chase. On the run, Ramzi Mohammed – he and five others deny conspiracy to murder".

Frightening and alarming stuff. Anyone watching at this point would be forgiven for thinking that some new terrorist atrocity had taken place. After all, it's headline news - it must be a fresh story?

It's not until a few minutes later that we hear what it's really about:

"The jury in the case of six men accused of plotting to bomb the London transport network has been shown dramatic new images of events on the 21st of July 2005."

In other words, the headline news story is that a court has been shown some 18-month-old images.

ITN's virtual news story

A similarly scaremongering approach was taken by ITN in its coverage (1/3/07) of the alleged "Birmingham terror plot", in which some people were alleged to be planning a kidnapping and (it's rumoured) a beheading. With nothing more substantial to go on than allegations and rumours (and government spin), ITN ran a headline story which took up most of its 30-minute 10.30pm News slot.

Every conceivable fear-raising device was used – old archive footage of terrorists and terrorist beheadings, gratuitous ruminations on the effects of such terrorist attacks becoming widespread in Britain, alarming but baseless speculations, more footage of terrorist executioners standing behind their blindfolded victims, wielding instruments suitable for decapitation, etc.

At one point a commentator stated that the terrorists didn't need to successfully carry out their plans – that their goals were accomplished simply by bringing fear to the country. He said this without any hint of irony in a "news" report which seemed to accomplish precisely this goal.

Complaints

If you notice any similar TV coverage, you might want to contact those responsible (eg see the following). We'd also be grateful if you could forward us the details.

Helen Boaden (Director, BBC news)
helenboaden.complaints@bbc.co.uk

Craig Oliver (Editor, BBC1 Ten O'Clock News)
craig.oliver@bbc.co.uk

Jonathan Munro (Head of news, ITN)
jonathan.munro@itn.co.uk

Ian Rumsey (Editor, ITV News)
ian.rumsey@itn.co.uk

For a longer list of media contacts click here

Sources:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6315989.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/UK/6292139.stm