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The Real First Casualty of War - Journalists are killers too!

forpressfound, Viernes, Abril 21, 2006 - 02:21

Henk Ruyssenaars

Without those collaborating cowards, the megaphones of the group which has the Gold & the Guns, all the massacres, the global suffering, the 9/11 'inside job'* the fake 'War on terror' nor their Holodomors would ever have been possible! They are killers!

NEVER BELIEVE ANYTHING UNTIL IT HAS BEEN OFFICIALLY DENIED

by Henk Ruyssenaars

FPF - Amsterdam - April 21st - 2006 - It's today three years and five days ago I published a story on how 'journalists' fertilize the global battlefields with the media manure they are spreading. (And I will never forget nor forgive the so called Journalists Union in The Netherlands (NVJ) for their part in the global war crimes. They really killed 'journalism' - which was an honest profession in Holland.) - In a very good article today one of the favorite reporters of the FPF, John Pilger, enforces what was written, in his usual eloquent manner, with some hair raising examples from the harsh reality a real journalist should describe. Otherwise it's never going to be a humane world, contrary to what has been happening for ages.*

Because, as I wrote: ''A question which needs an answer is however the following: are journalists killers too...? - And the answer is an unequivocal YES! Journalists kill when keeping silent about crimes by their governments and others. Or help fabricate propaganda supporting wars.'' - I sincerely hope to see the day when all those followers of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels - and I mean propagandists of ALL nationalities, and we know who they are, will be judged for their crimes against humanity.- Url.: http://tinyurl.com/4gwdv -

Like Pilger I've been living abroad for more than four decades, and find it unbelievable that so many of the people you thought you knew have sold themselves lock, stock and barrel to the killers. And those despicable cancerous information spreading traitors of humanity permanently 'forget' to inform the people they are supposed to work for - the readers, listeners, viewers, about the tens of millions of deaths in the trail of the cretins which have enslaved those Judasses. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/h4922

It's like Pilger confirms too: without those silent and sometimes secretly collaborating cowards, those miserable megaphones of the group which has the gold and the guns; all the massacres, the global suffering, the fake drama of the 9/11 'inside job* and the fake 'War on terror' or their Holodomors* - would never have been possible!

I do hope that those war propaganda criminals - of which some still falsely claim the title of 'Journalist' - will burn in Hell forever. If they - and the Group - sizzle like bacon one minute for every human being killed by their malignancy - they will be there for centuries. As they all, and very much deserve. - HR

JOHN PILGER: THE REAL FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR

How guilty those creatures in the propaganda press are is very well described by John Pilger in his article about The Real First Casualty of War: ''During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. The dissident novelist Zdenek Urbánek told me, "In one respect, we are more fortunate than you in the west. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. Unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines, because real truth is always subversive."

This acute skepticism, this skill of reading between the lines, is urgently needed in supposedly free societies today. Take the reporting of state-sponsored war. The oldest cliché is that truth is the first casualty of war. I disagree. Journalism is the first casualty. Not only that: it has become a weapon of war, a virulent censorship that goes unrecognized in the United States, Britain, and other democracies; censorship by omission, whose power is such that, in war, it can mean the difference between life and death for people in faraway countries, such as Iraq.

AS A JOURNALIST FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS, I HAVE TRIED TO UNDERSTAND HOW THIS WORKS.

In the aftermath of the U.S. war in Vietnam, which I reported, the policy in Washington was revenge, a word frequently used in private but never publicly. A medieval embargo was imposed on Vietnam and Cambodia; the Thatcher government cut off supplies of milk to the children of Vietnam. This assault on the very fabric of life in two of the world's most stricken societies was rarely reported; the consequence was mass suffering.

It was during this time that I made a series of documentaries about Cambodia. The first, in 1979, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia, described the American bombing that had provided a catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot, and showed the shocking human effects of the embargo. Year Zero was broadcast in some 60 countries, but never in the United States. When I flew to Washington and offered it to the national public broadcaster, PBS, I received a curious reaction. PBS executives were shocked by the film, and spoke admiringly of it, even as they collectively shook their heads. One of them said: "John, we are disturbed that your film says the United States played such a destructive role, so we have decided to call in a journalistic adjudicator."

PBS: THE TERM "JOURNALISTIC ADJUDICATOR" WAS OUT OF ORWELL.

PBS appointed one Richard Dudman, a reporter on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and one of the few Westerners to have been invited by Pol Pot to visit Cambodia. His dispatches reflected none of the savagery then enveloping that country; he even praised his hosts. Not surprisingly, he gave my film the thumbs-down. One of the PBS executives confided to me: "These are difficult days under Ronald Reagan. Your film would have given us problems."

The lack of truth about what had really happened in southeast Asia – the media-promoted myth of a "blunder" and the suppression of the true scale of civilian casualties and of routine mass murder, even the word "invasion" – allowed Reagan to launch a second "noble cause" in central America. The target was another impoverished nation without resources: Nicaragua, whose "threat," like Vietnam's, was in trying to establish a model of development different from that of the colonial dictatorships backed by Washington. Nicaragua was crushed, thanks in no small part to leading American journalists, conservative and liberal, who suppressed the triumphs of the Sandinistas and encouraged a specious debate about a "threat."

THE TRAGEDY IN IRAQ IS DIFFERENT, BUT, FOR JOURNALISTS, THERE ARE HAUNTING SIMILARITIES.

On Aug. 24 last year, a New York Times editorial declared: "If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry." This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that the invasion would never have happened if journalists had not betrayed the public by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them.

BBC (BROADCASTING BLAIR'S CRAP - HR): THE UNTHINKABLE WAS NORMALIZED

We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by MI6, the secret intelligence service. In what was called "Operation Mass Appeal," MI6 agents planted stories about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction – such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in secret underground bunkers. All these stories were fake. But this is not the point. The point is that the dark deeds of MI6 were quite unnecessary. Recently, the BBC's director of news, Helen Boaden, was asked to explain how one of her "embedded" reporters in Iraq, having accepted U.S. denials of the use of chemical weapons against civilians, could possibly describe the aim of the Anglo-American invasion as to "bring democracy and human rights" to Iraq. She replied with quotations from Blair that this was indeed the aim, as if Blair's utterances and the truth were in any way related.

On the third anniversary of the invasion, a BBC newsreader described this illegal, unprovoked act, based on lies, as a "miscalculation." Thus, to use Edward Herman's memorable phrase, the unthinkable was normalized.

Such servility to state power is hotly denied, yet routine. Almost the entire British media has omitted the true figure of Iraqi civilian casualties, willfully ignoring or attempting to discredit respectable studies. "Making conservative assumptions," wrote the researchers from the eminent Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, working with Iraqi scholars, "we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq … which were primarily the result of military actions by coalition forces. Most of those killed by coalition forces were women and children…." That was Oct. 29, 2004. Today, the figure has doubled.*

"WAR ON TERROR" IS A FAKE METAPHOR THAT INSULTS OUR INTELLIGENCE.

Language is perhaps the most crucial battleground. Noble words such as "democracy," "liberation," "freedom," and "reform" have been emptied of their true meaning and refilled by the enemies of those concepts. The counterfeits dominate the news, along with dishonest political labels, such as "left of center," a favorite given to warlords such as Blair and Bill Clinton; it means the opposite. "War on terror" is a fake metaphor that insults our intelligence. We are not at war. Instead, our troops are fighting insurrections in countries where our invasions have caused mayhem and grief, the evidence and images of which are suppressed. How many people know that, in revenge for 3,000 innocent lives taken on Sept. 11, 2001, up to 20,000 innocent people died in Afghanistan?

HUGO CH

Foreign Press Foundation
Pilger on propaganda journalism


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