The new rulers of the world
by Pat Corcoran
[ bookreviews ]
I first encountered John Pilger through his book The Last Day, the tale of the US sunset in Vietnam: the casual racism of the British Ambassador ("the Yanks will look after any stray palefaces"); the GI who tried to win hearts and minds by distributing toothbrushes. Later, I found my idol had feet of clay: his understanding of the "troubles" in the North of Ireland wasn't anti-imperialist enough for me!
His latest book, The New Rulers of the World, comprises four essays which expose the links between globalisation and imperialism.
'The Model Pupil' tells of the West's support for General Suharto's savage coup in Indonesia in 1965. His US-trained minions slaughtered between 500,000 and one million people, mainly members of the Communist Party, but also many ethnic Chinese.
The CIA engineered this coup while other Western leaders looked on with ill-disguised glee, and the multinationals moved in to carve up the country's economy between them. There is a vivid description of how the resources of Indonesia were divided up in five different rooms, each dealing with a sector of the economy. The multinationals wrote the legislative framework for the expropriation of Indonesia.
The IMF and World Bank gave billions of dollars of loans to Suharto's regime despite Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, where 300,000 people died. Suharto was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1998, but Indonesia still "owes" $262 billion to Western financial institutions. This after Indonesia, to a large extent, has been stripped of its resources.
Before the fall of Suharto, IMF officals arrogantly dismissed evidence presented to them by Pilger that Suharto's family and cronies had siphoned off billions from the loans.
'Paying the Price' reveals the true horror the US bombing and sanctions have inflicted on the people of Iraq. Thousands of Iraqi children die every month because of the effects of depleted uranium ammunition used by the United Nations in its 1991 onslaught on Iraq. These weapons have caused a staggering increase in the cancer rates and other diseases in Iraq. Pilger shows that even the US Army experts accept that the depleted uranium is responsible. Iraqi doctors cannot treat these diseases because the UN does not allow medical supplies through, as they could be used for military purposes. This, despite the evidence provided by WHO experts: "We informed the UN that there was no possibility of converting these drugs into chemical warfare agents. The saddest thing I saw in Iraq was children dying because there was no chemotherapy and no pain control", said Karol Sikora, chief of the cancer programme of the World Health Organisation.
Thousands more die from the effects of economic sanctions. After reparations to Kuwait and the UN's administrative cut, only $100 per person a year is left from the Oil for Food money. (Madeline Allbright thought the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was "worth it".)
'The Great Game' goes through the lies and hypocrisy of Western rulers as they launched murderous campaigns on civilian populations in Iraq, Serbia and then Afghanistan. Pilger describes this as "Western state terrorism". It was never about the "humanitarian intervention", as claimed. The reality was the pursuit of power and the control of economic resources. Thus is exposed the "new imperialism".
In the war against terrorism," said Bush, "we're going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes." As Pilger shows, it shouldn't take long, as more terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the US than anywhere in the world. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future despots, and various international war criminals.
General José Guillermo García was head of El Salvador's military during the 1980s, when army death squads murdered thousands of people. He now lives in Florida, as does General Prosper Avril, the Haitian dictator who liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot's henchman and apologist at the UN, lives in New York. General Mansour Moharari, who ran the Shah of Iran's notorious prisons, resides in Maine.
Irony is truly dead in "The Free World".
The final essay, 'The Chosen Ones', illustrates the appalling systematic racism of Australia, Pilger's own country, towards the aboriginal peoples, the original inhabitants of the country. He exposes the lies, how health facilities and education are underfunded. A de facto apartheid still exists in Australia which this was glossed over for the g'day cobber image of the Sydney Olympics.
Far from being the "Lucky Country", Pilger argues that: "Like Britain and the US, Australia is a single ideology state with two competing factions, discernible largely by the personalities of their politicans".
No, he's not embittered in late middle age. Pilger is obviously enthused by the anti-capitalist movement that has swept the world in recent years. After outlining a number of recent struggles against capitalism and globalisation, Pilger says, "The list is endless and a source of optimism. Contrary to myth, people are seldom compliant. That the real terror is poverty, from which some 24,000 people die every day, is beyond public dispute."
This book gave me heart, as we approach an escalation of the ongoing war against Iraq. The good fight is always worth it.
