We Need To Be Told by John Pilger

John Pilger exagera. Mas só isso ajuda a memória dos mortos por ordem do Estado que já nem podem exagerar. A arte do jornalismo reside em saber exagerar a verdade para que esta não seja soterrada pelo enxurro de banalidades quotidianas. Vale sempre a pena lê-lo!

"The propagandist's purpose," wrote Aldous Huxley, "is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human." The British, who invented modern war propaganda and inspired Joseph Goebbels, were specialists in the field. At the height of the slaughter known as the First World War, the prime minister, David Lloyd George, confided to C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: "If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know."

With British-supplied Hawk jets and machine-guns, Suharto's army went on to crush the life out of a quarter of the population of East Timor : 200,000 people. Using the same Hawk jets and machine-guns, the same genocidal army is now attempting to crush the life out of the resistance movement in West Papua and protect the Freeport company, which is mining a mountain of copper in the province. (Henry Kissinger is "director emeritus.") Some 100,000 Papuans, 18 per cent of the population, have been killed; yet this British-backed "project," as new Labour likes to say, is almost never reported.

What happened in Indonesia , and continues to happen, is almost a mirror image of the attack on Iraq . Both countries have riches coveted by the west; both had dictators installed by the west to facilitate the passage of their resources; and in both countries, blood-drenched Anglo-American actions have been disguised by propaganda willingly provided by journalists prepared to draw the necessary distinctions between Saddam's regime ("monstrous") and
Suharto's ("moderate" and "stable").

Since the invasion of Iraq , I have spoken to a number of principled journalists working in the pro-war media, including the BBC, who say that they and many others "lie awake at night" and want to speak out and resume being real journalists. I suggest now is the time.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/pilger/pilger32.html