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/ 5 February 2007
The Australian writer Donald Horne meant the title of his celebrated book, The Lucky Country, as irony. “Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck,” he lamented in 1964, describing much of the Australian elite as unfailingly unoriginal, race-obsessed and in thrall to imperial power and its wars.
The war lovers I have known in real wars have usually been harmless, except to themselves. They were attracted to Vietnam and Cambodia, where drugs were plentiful. Bosnia, with its roulette of death, was another favourite. A few would say they were there ”to tell the world”; the honest ones would say they loved it, writes John Pilger.
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/ 27 February 2006
Has Tony Blair, the minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilised world and brought carnage to a defenceless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes?
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/ 31 January 2006
"On Christmas Eve, I dropped in on Brian Haw, whose hunched, pacing figure was just visible through the freezing fog. For four and a half years, Brian has camped in London’s Parliament Square with a graphic display of photographs that show the terror and suffering imposed on Iraqi children by British policies," writes John Pilger.
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/ 23 September 2005
Thomas Friedman is a famous columnist on The New York Times. He has been described as “a guard dog of United States foreign policy”. Whatever America’s warlords have in mind for the rest of humanity, Friedman will bark it. He boasts that “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist”. He promotes bombing countries and says World War III has begun.
Over the past two weeks, the contrast between two related ”global” events has been salutary. The first was the World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul; the second the G8 meeting in Scotland and the Make Poverty History campaign. Following the media in Britain, you would know nothing about the Istanbul meetings.
The front page of the London Observer on June 12 announced, ”-Â billion Africa debt deal ‘a victory for millions”’. The ”victory for millions” is a quotation of Bob Geldof, who said, ”Tomorrow 280-million Africans will wake up for the first time in their lives without owing you or me a penny …”
”I tried to phone her the other day. I still have a number she gave me, which I could call infrequently and exchange a few words. It was fruitless to try this time; the hurried click at the other end was an echo of her Kafkaesque oppression. The isolation of Aung San Suu Kyi is now complete, in the 10th year of her detention,” writes John Pilger. Clearly with an eye to its vast Asian market, the European Union has shamelessly appeased the Burmese junta.
The West’s crusaders, the United States and Britain, are giving less to help the tsunami victims than the cost of a Stealth bomber or a week’s bloody occupation of Iraq. The bill for President George W Bush’s coming inauguration party would rebuild much of the coastline of Sri Lanka. Bush and Tony Blair increased their first driblets of ”aid” only when it became clear that people worldwide were giving millions and a public relations problem beckoned.
A myth equal to the fable of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction is gaining strength on both sides of the Atlantic. It is that John Kerry offers a world-view different from that of George W Bush. Watch this big lie grow as Kerry is crowned the Democratic candidate and the ”anyone but Bush” movement becomes a liberal cause celebre.