[Firestarter]

John Pilger – Hidden agendas

In this post a book by the Australian John Pilger. Because this 1998 book describes different situations in a variety of (mostly third world) countries I find it hard to catagorise and summarise the book.
According to Pilger it’s about the “slow news” that never gets much media attention. The news about “unpeople” in underveloped countries being terrorised by dictatorial goverments that are supported with arms from the US and Britain. Brutal dictatorial regimes are even helped to get control over a country.

The wars of Britain and American are against democracy and freedom; and are nothing but genocide.
In 1998, President Clinton is re-arming much of Latin America, and a £22 billion arms bonanza is near with NATO expanding into Eastern Europe.
British arms company Mil-Tac, armed the Hutu militia in former Zaire.


World Bank, IMF, debt and “free” trade
Countries are enslaved by debt and it are only the wealthy that profit from these loans. Multinational corporations take the profit from exploiting the third world.
In 1995, more than 80% of investment ended up in just 12 countries. The 48 least developed countries attracted only 0.5%.
In 1998, a Filipino child died every hour, in a country where more than half the national budget is given over to the World Bank and IMF to repay “loans”.

Almost half the world's “free trade” is conducted as transactions within 180 multinational corporations, mostly from the US and Japan, with the rest British, French, German and Swiss. Annual sales of the largest 8 companies exceed the Gross Domestic Product of 50 countries with over half the world's population.

The world government was hard at work following the collapse of Asia. What was reported in the West as a “bail out” by the International Monetary Fund, in reality the IMF's “rescue packages” represent an audacious takeover of Asian economies, for example in South Korea, where companies are forced to surrender to foreign control and workers' rights are slashed.

Following a plan devised by President Reagan's Treasury Secretary James Baker, indebted countries were offered World Bank and IMF loans in return for “structural adjustment”. This meant that the economic policy of these countries would be dictated from Washinton DC.
To add to the bewildering array of imperial acronyms (TRIMS, TRIPS, NAFTA, SAPs and so on), there is now the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) that gives multinational corporations the right to challenge local laws before an international tribunal, while governments or their citizens have no right to take action against offending corporations.


The industrial military complex
In Britain, almost half of all research and development funds are allocated to “defence”.
More than half of all British “aid” to the developing world goes through the Aid for Trade Provisions (ATP) scam. In 1988, Alan Clark, Thatcher's Trade Minister, set up a little-known fund of £1 billion, from which the Export Credit Guarantee Department (ECGD) financed Third World regimes to buy British arms. By 1993, more than half of the credit guarantees of the ECGD underwrote arms sales, mostly to Indonesia and Malaysia. In one of those strange coincidences, the highest recipients of British “aide” are among the biggest buyers of British weapons...

In 1995, the Independent reported that the British subsidiary of the now bankrupt British multinational Astra, BMARC, circumvented a British Government embargo by sending arms to Iran via Singapore.
What wasn´t revealed was that in 1990, BMARC also secretly supplied arms and ammunition to the Burmese generals through Singapore and in defiance of another British Government ban.

Reportedly the group surrounding Margaret Thatcher´s son, Mark, received 5% of $4 billion as commission on the arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Diego Garcia is a British colony in the Indian Ocean. Its inhabitants were simply deported to install a US army base there, in violation with Articles 9 and 13 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “no one should be subjected to arbitrary exile” and “everybody has the right to return to his country”.

In the 1960s, 40% of US tax dollars went towards subsidising the “'military industrial complex”.
In 1993, almost two-thirds of American arms export agreements with developing countries were with Saudi Arabia.


The end of the Cold War
Gore Vidal described the Cold War with the Soviet Union as “an American fiction”, with an effective agreement on “spheres of influence”. The United States had no intention to rescue the Hungarians when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956 or the Czechoslovaks when they were invaded in 1968. The Soviet Union had no desire to help the Vietnamese to expel the American invader, or to fight in Latin America.
Secret British planning documents, dismiss the “Soviet threat” as non-existent, even in the Middle East.

Since the re-invasion of Russia by the forces of globalisation, Russia's economy has halved and its GDP has been reduced to that of the (much smaller) Netherlands.


The free press myth
We have government by the media, and media for the government.
Alfred Hugenberg controlled nearly half the German press by the end of the 1920s. Without Hugenberg “the triumph of the Nazis” wouldn´t have been possible.

In 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor of the Guardian disclosed that some 500 prominent Britons were paid by the CIA through the corrupt Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) in London, including 90 journalists, many in “senior positions”.
The supposed once “high standards” of British journalism were destroyed, mostly by Rupert Murdoch, who has succeeded in evading taxes by shell companies in offshore money laundering paradises. MI5 agent Robert Maxwell looted the pension fund and destroyed the “quality” of the Mirror (where Pilger worked at the time).




Genocide of Iraq
The Gulf War in 1991 was reported as an event of bloodless science in which there were “miraculously few casualties” – and quite a miracle it was! In reality 70% (!) of the 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq and Kuwait missed their targets and many fell in populated areas, killing civilians.
Few journalists reported the truth that at least 250.000 Iraqis were slaughtered by the brutal bombing – including cluster bombs. Since then, another at least half a million children died as a result of the economic sanctions. Because of munition made from Depleted Uranium, with a radioactive half-life of 125,000 years, the devastating effects on future generations will be similar to those of “Agent Orange” in Vietnam.

Norman Schwarzkopf boasted that at least 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed, he forgot the civilian deaths.
US Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, who later was appointed Secretary of State, answered the question whether the lives of half a million Iraqi children were too high a price, with: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, is worth it”.


Exploiting the third world
According to the World Health Organization in 1998, one third of the children in the world are malnourished.

Thailand, China and India produce sport shoes and toys for very low wages, including child labour.
In 1993, 2 industrial fires in toy factories in Thailand and China, killed 275 workers, most of them in their early teens. Hundreds were terribly burned.
In Haiti, girls from very poor families produce baseballs for the US.

General Augusto Pinochet was made dictator with the help of the CIA, during his military reign 130,000 Chileans were murdered, tortured and “disappeared”.
The World Bank and IMF proudly boasted on the results: Chile's debt grew to officially a whopping almost half of the GDP but in reality was even higher, with most of Chile's debt concealed in “debt-equity swaps”.


Mandela the president for white South Africa
In 1975, IMF funded “Apartheid” South Africa more than the rest of the continent together.

After the lawyer Nelson Mandela became the first black president of South Africa, it were mostly the white elite that profited. Mandela became president on condition that the multinational corporations would be helped as they “opened up” the South African economy.
Black frontmen were selected as the corporate faces for white-controlled companies. Like for example Cyril Ramaphosa, chairman of a number of leading companies, and a close ally of the next President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki.

Since South Africa became a “democracy”, the amount money going to the police and prisons has risen by a quarter in a country with already one of the world's biggest security systems. From 1995 to 1998, deaths in police custody doubled.
Since Mandela became president the wealth gap has grown like never before, up to 100,000 jobs a year were lost and the desperately needed public services were curtailed. Many farm labourers are arbitrarily evicted as if nothing had changed.
But instead black South Africans have received the right to abortions!


From Thatcher and Reagan to Blair and Clinton
While small-time dealers are pursued in Clinton's “war on drugs”, money laundering, much of it related to the international “narco-trade”, flows unimpeded through the Caribbean tax havens to the US.
At the end of Reagan as president, the top 20% of the population got most of the income, while the bottom 60% had record lows. Wages fell below 1973 levels.
In Clinton's “Democracy”, 1% of the population controls 40% of the national wealth; profits are at an all-time high, having risen by 19% in 5 years while wages and welfare benefits have grown with only 1%.

Since the year Lady of the Garter Margaret Thatcher became Elizabeth’s Prime Minister, more than £63 billion in subsidies has been transferred from the poor to the rich. When Margaret Thatcher was PM, the number of poor Britons rose with 60%, to a quarter of the British population by 1998. The UN Human Development Report for 1997 writes that in no other country has poverty “increased as substantially” since the early 1980s.
In Britain, Peter Mandelson solved the problem of the “poverty” by renaming it “Social Exclusion”.

Peter Mandelson, George Robertson, Marjorie Mowlam, Chris Smith, Elizabeth Symons and Blair's chief of staff Jonathan Powell were members of the British-American Project for the Successor Generation funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts of Philadelphia, established by the billionaire J. Howard Pew, chairman of Sun Oil.
Among the right-wing groups supportd by Pew are the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (set up by former head of the CIA William Casey).

In the 1980s, hundreds of miles of waterfront and docks in Britain were handed over to bankers, financiers and speculators.
According to chairman Gordon Waddell “It was odd, that a company with a government shareholder should be buying a privatised port”. This is a striking example of “wealth creation”, using tax pounds.


Liverpool dockers replaced by cheap labour
While in Liverpool the dockers generated greater profit than almost anywhere in Britain, its inhabitants remain very poor.

On 25 September 1995, dockers working for Torside, were ordered to work overtime for a disputed rate. After they protested, they were immediately fired. Three days later, they mounted a picket line and the 329 men employed by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company that refused to cross it, were also summarily dismissed.
They were replaced with cheap, flexible labour, for an hourly rate of £4 for “all hours”, without any guarantee on the amount of hours of work and pay per week. Men were placed “on call” during their days off, so that they could be summoned back to work at any time.

The dockers were represented by Britain's second largest union the Transport and General Workers' Union that did nothing for them “because” the dockers' action was technically against the recently introduced law.
The Liverpool dockers succeeded in arranging strikes in ports all over the globe instead, including in: Newark, Florida and Los Angeles in the US; New Brunswick and Montreal in Canada; Sweden; Denmark; Rotterdam in the Netherlands; Greece; France; Germany; Sydney, Australia; Auckland, Wellington and Lyttleton in New Zealand; South Africa.


Suharto and the Timor genocide
More than 60,000 people were slaughtered in the first 3 months of the invasion. In the 20 years since Indonesia illegally invaded East Timor, at least 200,000 people have died. According to Gabriel Defert, the real figure is closer to 300,000.

On arrival in Indonesia, Robin Cook gave one of the world's most vicious dictatorships a “deal on human rights”. At the time, Suharto’s Indonesia were conducting “Operation Finish Them Off in East Timor”, with British arms whose delivery he refused to stop.
Indonesia's special forces, Kopassus, patrol East Timor in civilian dress in unmarked vehicles, armed with Heckler and Koch automatic weapons from British Aerospace. Their marksmen train on simulators used by the SAS and their death squads train in British equipment. Indonesian military officers and pilots are trained in Britain.


Burmese days – Ne Win
In February 1995, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions reported that in the Burma of dictator General Ne Win a million people had been forced from their homes in Rangoon alone. The following violations were commonplace: “Torture, summary and arbitrary executions, forced labour, abuse of women, politically motivated arrests and detention, forced displacement, important restrictions on the freedoms of expression and association and oppression of ethnic and religious minorities”.
Burma plays an important role in the world production of heroin.

In the south of Burma, the death railway was constructed with slave labour, including children. This is connected to the pipeline of the French oil company Total in a consortium that includes Unocal, the British Premier Oil, Nippon Oil and Texaco.
The German electronics conglomerate Siemens, the Dutch multinational Philips and Ireland's Dragon Oil are major investors in this project.


The US victory in Cambodia and Vietnam
Orchestrating the Cambodia genocide started in 1969, with the brutal secret bombing campaign, launched by President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (who later was awarded the Nobel Price for bringing peace to the region!). Between 1969 and 1973, American bombers killed some 750.000 Cambodian peasants. To conceal this crime, US pilots' logs were falsified.
In reality, the genocidal Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were promoted by the US and Britain.
In 1992, when the Western powers returned to Cambodia, they came under the United Nations' flag to impose a “peace plan” devised by US Congressman Stephen Solarz.

Not only the Gulf of Tonkin attack was completely fake; the later announced “conclusive proof” of Hanoi's preparations to invade the south - weapons found floating in a North Vietnamese junk off China Beach were a “master illusion'”.
In 1983, former senior CIA specialist Ralph McGehee told Pilger that “The CIA, loaded up the junk with communist weapons, floated it off the coast, then brought in the international press. We got the headlines we wanted, and the marines followed".

According to Pilger, the US didn´t really lose in Vietnam as they took control of all the countries surrounding it.
In the 1990s, Vietnam was told that the price for entry into the “global economy” are cities of sweatshops and a countryside of landlords.

Vietnamese journalist Nhu T. Le wrote that the new foreign banks and private enterprises,

are meant to create a Hobbesian world of scarce resources inhabited by desperate people willing to do almost anything to feed their families. The marketeers are making an argument about human nature – that fear and greed are the fundamental human motivations. But in Vietnam, three million people in the grave serve as its greatest refutation.

John Pilger – Hidden agendas (1998): https://archive.org/details/fp_Hidden_Ag...ohn_Pilger
(http://archive.is/xpNbq)