John Pilger: Forcing Down Evo Morales's Plane Was an Act of Air Piracy
John
Pilger, Thursday 4 July 2013
Imagine the aircraft
of the president of France being forced down in Latin America on
"suspicion" that it was carrying a political refugee to safety – and
not just any refugee but someone who has provided the people of the world with
proof of criminal activity on an epic scale.
Imagine the response
from Paris, let alone the "international community", as the
governments of the west call themselves. To a chorus of baying indignation from
Whitehall to Washington, Brussels to Madrid, heroic special forces would be
dispatched to rescue their leader and, as sport, smash up the source of such
flagrant international gangsterism. Editorials would cheer them on, perhaps
reminding readers that this kind of piracy was exhibited by the German Reich in
the 1930s.
The forcing down of
Bolivian President Evo Morales's plane – denied airspace by France, Spain and
Portugal, followed by his 14-hour confinement while Austrian officials demanded
to "inspect" his aircraft for the "fugitive" Edward Snowden
– was an act of air piracy and state terrorism. It was a metaphor for the
gangsterism that now rules the world and the cowardice and hypocrisy of
bystanders who dare not speak its name.
In Moscow, Morales
had been asked about Snowden – who remains trapped in the city's airport.
"If there were a request [for political asylum]," he said, "of
course, we would be willing to debate and consider the idea." That was
clearly enough provocation for the Godfather. "We have been in touch with
a range of countries that had a chance of having Snowden land or travel through
their country," said a US state department official.
The French – having
squealed about Washington spying on their every move, as revealed by Snowden –
were first off the mark, followed by the Portuguese. The Spanish then did their
bit by enforcing a flight ban of their airspace, giving the Godfather's
Viennese hirelings enough time to find out if Snowden was indeed invoking
article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states:
"Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum
from persecution."
Those paid to keep
the record straight have played their part with a cat-and-mouse media game that
reinforces the Godfather's lie that this heroic young man is running from a
system of justice, rather than preordained, vindictive incarceration that
amounts to torture – ask Bradley Manning and the living ghosts in Guantánamo.
Historians seem to
agree that the rise of fascism in Europe might have been averted had the
liberal or left political class understood the true nature of its enemy. The
parallels today are very different, but the Damocles sword over Snowden, like
the casual abduction of Bolivia's president, ought to stir us into recognising
the true nature of the enemy.
Snowden's revelations
are not merely about privacy, or civil liberty, or even mass spying. They are
about the unmentionable: that the democratic facades of the US now barely
conceal a systematic gangsterism historically identified with, if not
necessarily the same as, fascism. On Tuesday, a US drone killed 16 people in
North Waziristan, "where many of the world's most dangerous militants
live", said the few paragraphs I read. That by far the world's most
dangerous militants had hurled the drones was not a consideration. President
Obama personally sends them every Tuesday.
In his acceptance of
the 2005 Nobel prize in literature, Harold Pinter referred to "a vast
tapestry of lies, upon which we feed". He asked why "the systematic
brutality, the widespread atrocities" of the Soviet Union were well known
in the west while America's crimes were "superficially recorded, let alone
documented, let alone acknowledged". The most enduring silence of the modern
era covered the extinction and dispossession of countless human beings by a
rampant US and its agents. "But you wouldn't know it," said Pinter.
"It never happened. Even while it was happening it never happened."
This hidden history –
not really hidden, of course, but excluded from the consciousness of societies
drilled in American myths and priorities – has never been more vulnerable to
exposure. Snowden's whistleblowing, like that of Manning and Julian Assange and
WikiLeaks, threatens to break the silence Pinter described. In revealing a vast
Orwellian police state apparatus servicing history's greatest war-making
machine, they illuminate the true extremism of the 21st century. Unprecedented,
Germany's Der Spiegel has described the Obama administration as "soft
totalitarianism". If the penny is falling, we might all look closer to
home.
