My Apollian Memory. Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davie. www.daviesart.com

Der Spiegel writer Jochen Bolsche, whose piece ‘This is a Think Tank War’ is published on Webdiary at A think tank war: Why old Europe says no, sent me a translation of his article about the use of the internet by the anti-war movement.

 

Resistance to ‘Brainwashington’

by Jochen Bolsche (spiegel)

The anger at the war mongers and brainwashers in the White House is increasing world wide. “The disgust at being lied to” even prompts hundreds of thousands of younger Americans to resist. The major weapon of the new peace “international” is the Internet.

Unlike the flower children of the Vietnam war, they are not demanding to “make love not war”. Distrust and anger at Washington’s intentions of breaking international law in order to lead a war of aggression have created a new kind of anti war rallying cry, “Make law, not war”.

The resistance to Bush’s attempt to replace the “power of the law by the law of power” (Gerhard Schroeder) has driven millions out into the streets, even in the United States. The American historian Maurice Issermann recently said that the protest movement in the United States is already stronger than it was during the time of the Vietnam war. “At that time it took several years before it reached the point at which we are now, even though soldiers had already died in the field”.

A terror monger as terror profiteer?

What many of the new “peace demonstrators” have in common is the weariness and disgust at being lied to, remarked the Swiss Wochen-Zeitung. Not a single day goes by on which critical American media don’t uncover facts that makes Bush’s motives appear questionable.

It has long been known that most of the present Administration officials have a verifiable history of mixing political office and business interests. At the beginning of this week, however, Pulitzer winning journalist Seymour Hersch of the New Yorker uncovered a particularly spectacular case of sleaze.

At its center is Richard Perle, the head of the influential “Defense Policy Board” (DPB), who has for years been pressing for a war against Iraq in the ultra conservative Think Tank ‘Project for a New American Century’, of which he is on the Board of Directors.

Correspondence with the Croesus of the Orient

Perle not only has his finger to an unknown degree in the media business, for example as director of the right wing “Jerusalem Post”, writes Hirsch ” but the super hawk is also the managing partner of a company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was grounded in Delaware two months after the tragic events of September 11. The goal of the company: To make money on the fear of war and terror.

In a letter to Adnan Kashoggi, the multi billionaire arms dealer who was born in Saudi Arabia, Trireme wrote in November 2002 that it’s main field of activity was to invest in companies which offer services and products for “homeland security and defense”. “The fear of terrorism”, it says in the letter to the Croisus of the Orient , according to the New Yorker, will increase the demand for such products.”

A war monger as war profiteer, a fighter of terror as a profiteer of terror? And as if this notoriety were not bad enough, Perle reacted by rudely insulting the renowned journalist in a CNN interview: “Hersch is the closest thing to a terrorist that the USA has”.

Freelance journalists as fair targets?

A few days later it became clear how great the fear of freelance journalists must be in the Pentagon, which Perle’s Defense Policy Board advises. The popular BBC war correspondent Kate Adie announced that the US military only wants to see handpicked journalists in Iraq. Independent journalists who do not work within the US framework and who make their reports to their editorial offices on satellite phones have to count with the possibility of being in the line of fire of the American Air Force.

Whenever a fighter plane gets the signal of a satellite phone, Kate Adie quotes “a senior officer at the Pentagon”, they will take the source in their line of fire. Freelance journalists who wanted to go to Iraq have been given this information. “Well, they know this…. they’ve been warned”.

The “news blackout” that the US is aiming for poses a massive threat to the freedom of the press, says the experienced reporter, who had already reported from the last Iraq war. The selection practices of the Pentagon is also aimed at the exclusion of critical journalists; this time war sceptics will be denied accreditation.

“The best and the brightest”

While the confidence in much of the mainstream media is decreasing even in the United States, and the fear grows of being the targets of Bush Administration disinformation, some young Americans – perhaps the “best and the brightest” of their generation – have begun to create an alternative information flow to shoo away all the crows and hawks that are nesting on the Potomac these days.

Their major source of information for the spreading of uncensored information is the Internet.

Tens of thousands of American citizens are accessing European websites like the online editions of Irish newspapers or British TV stations. BBC Online, for example, registers 50% of its readers at present from the US. “The US public turns to Europe for news”, reports the media magazine “dot journalism”.

In German on line editorial departments young Americans like ‘Susan’ email and ask for permission to translate articles critical of Bush and make them available to friends at home “because the American press wouldn’t print a story like this”, or because “American papers mostly represent the Administration’s viewpoint” as pointed out by ‘John’.

When the truth goes on line

While the US users turn away from the easily manipulated local mass media and look for “unadulterated news”, the German professional information service “intern. de” is already anticipating a reversal of the media world: In the formation of opinion about actual events, the US press, which is mostly in step with each other, is apparently beginning to lose “impact”, while the Internet is “playing a much more significant role than has been assumed up to now”.

Germany’s ex Secretary of State Hans Dietrich Genscher even sees changes of historic proportions. “The entrance into the information highway has led to the creation of an international opinion. People in all parts of the world have access to the same information,” wrote the Liberal Party politician in a newspaper column this week.

The result, according to Genscher, is that, “Restriction measures against information are hardly effective anymore”, and that “this explains the continuing demands for further inspections in Iraq, even in countries whose governments have long ago decided for a military solution”.

Of course there are also – and especially – in the US itself numerous websites who have taken on the task of spreading suppressed information. The news-ticker www.buzzflash.com and the web offering of a newspaper with the unusual name “Mother Jones”, which, according to Greenpeace, conceals the “most biting and best magazine in America”, belong to the alternative Online scene in the US.

Like its mother journal, www.motherjones.com is part of an American tradition which is totally different than that of of the oil magnate Bush family, which has gotten richer from war to war.

Mother Jones and the machine gun massacre

The coalminer widow Mary Harris (Mother) Jones, who died in 1930 at age 100, had been an activist in the Democratic party and had fought against child labor, defended brutally persecuted trade unionists, and bravely denounced the “machine gun massacre” in which mine owners had 20 mining strikers murdered in 1914. The motto of the Irish Catholic had been “pray for the dead, and fight like the devil for the living”.

The varied international democratic and radical democratic Bush opponents are networking within the alternative journalism landscape of motherjones.com and other websites – including offerings like the German Feldpolitik.de.

A member of the congregation affronts his own Church

Up to date link lists refer to important copy by investigative journalists, human rights activists, peace researchers and other information which the brain washers in “Brainwashington”, as the Bush Administration is called on these sites, would like to hide from the general public.

For example, while the President is shown as a God fearing Christian by the mainstream media, the web media documents not only the relentless war criticism of the Pope (“immoral, illegal, and unjust”), but also the protests of the Bishops in Bush’s own Methodist Church, which he has been offending for weeks; the unmanageable Bishops have to wait around until he is ready to give them an audience.

Or, while conservative newspapers describe a French UN veto as an unspeakable provocation, the alternative media shows that the United States has used its veto disproportionately more than any other member of the Security Council.

Ex agent warns of “historical insanity”

While conservative pundits, in harmony with Bush, cite Iraq’s disregard for the UN resolution as automatic grounds for war, the truth seekers on the web counter that other countries, even the democratic Israel, apostrophied as “USrael”, have defied the United Nations over many more resolutions than the dictator in Baghdad.

While in most mainstream media war opponents are at best allowed to have their say on the advertising pages, the web allows everyone access, for example, the appeal of the 14,000 writers and academics who condemn Bush’s war as “morally unacceptable”. Equally accessible world wide is British author and ex agent John Le Carre’s opinion that in this “phases of historical insanity” the Bush Administration is handling the fact that double the number of those killed in Vietnam were killed in the first Iraq war, as if it were a state secret.

J.R. Ewing recalls “Dallas” episode 220

Many American and German homepages disseminate information about the dates and locations of demonstrations in addition to popular anti war slogans like ” weapons inspectors in the USA!” and “Saving energy helps avoid war”, while others offer a variety of biting Bush satires or point out brilliant pieces like the virtual interview on the Iraq war with the revolting oil magnate J.R. Ewing, on Telepolis.de. Sample:

Question: Political observers expect the overthrow of the oil monarchs in the Gulf States, for example, Saudi Arabia.

Ewing: I had a similar project once, let me see, I think it was in episode 220 and later. I wanted to sabotage the Saudi oil production at the time, but of course, with more modest means. It went terribly wrong and I had enormous problems with the Justice Department (swears at the thought, but calms down). But luckily, we have our boys in the Administration now.

Question: Oil economists are anticipating a crisis in the oil markets.

Ewing: Europe and China need a damper anyway, they’ve become much too insubordinate lately. And the USA can always use a new challenge.

Question: Many observers predict new terror attacks, like the ones on the World Trade Center.

Ewing: We’re in Dallas, Texas here. New York is more than 1,500 miles away.

Question: President Bush is considered to be a very religious man. What role do you think does Christianity play in his politics?

Ewing: Most Texans go to church every Sunday. We live by the principle that God helps the successful.

Question: The reelection of Bush could be difficult if the predictions of the sceptics came true and there were an oil crisis, the financial markets crashed, and there were new acts of terror…

Ewing: Why? What’s good for the Texas oil industry is good for Texas. And what’s good for Texas is good for America.

Question: Doesn’t the image of the United States suffer under Bush’s politics?

Ewing: Why? What’s good for America is good for the world. (Looks at his watch). Unfortunately I have no more time for you… apppointments, you understand.

The story of Saddam’s flying saucer

Relatively few websites offer the questionable or uncanny, for example supernatural stories about conspiracy illumination or bizarre exposes about the background of the Iraq crisis, such as reportedly appeared in Pravda at one time.

According to that story, Saddam once gave asylum to the alien survivors of a flying saucer who had special genetic know how who helped him create “fighting scorpions” that are “as large as cows” and now help him guard his palaces. This report actually exists, but instead of being on the political pages of Pravda, it was on a Russian fun site. Fun here, jokes there, it’s possible that the rapid growth of the international peace network could contribute to changing the world.

The contacts between war opponents on this and the other side of the Atlantic are already revealing to both sides how dumb it would be to confuse anti Bushism with anti Americanism. America is not only the Texans and the “Stupid White Men” but also Mother Jones and her young fans.

Bush accomplishes what he’s against

The worldwide discomfort with Bush’s war plans, speculates the essayist Oliver Fahrni in the Swiss Wochenzeitung, could possibly even lead to Bush’s unwittingly accomplishing what he’s against: a bit of international community.

The only thing to fear is that the road there will be filled with mountains of corpses. If Bush keeps his promise to incinerate Iraq, among others, with the “mother of all bombs” now demonstrated on TV, then the TV screens will again be filled with enormously suggestible pictures from Baghdad.

“Pentagon employees admit that it is understood that Hiroshima serves as the prototype for Baghdad”, writes the US scientist William La Fleur in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “The new bombs have relinquished radiation, but their unequalled, until now unimaginable explosive power makes up for the loss. The Pentagon hopes to force the Iraqis to capitulate, like the Japanese did in 1945.”

Fireworks like in Hiroshima

“The fire magic on the TV screens will be even more impressive than the CNN spectacle of 1991,” predicts the Japanology professor from Philadelphia. “The sight of simply impressive missiles and exploding rockets will release thrusts of adrenalin in us. Our bodies will prickle with excitement…. we’ll see fireworks that will be almost as good as the famous mushroom shaped cloud.”

But like once in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an outcry of horror will come later, “when fearless photographers happen on the scenes and open our eyes to that which has remained down there”.

Whatever will have been burned and mutilated – the black gold of Iraq should not come to harm.

Broadcaster threatens with war crimes trial

The New Scientist has recently reported that a mysterious new broadcaster is being heard in Iraq. The anonymous propagandist uses drastic language to warn against “wilful damage” to oil drilling equipment: “The incoming government will prosecute every saboteur as a war criminal.”

Americans, on the other hand, will hardly have to worry about answering to a war crimes tribunal. From the beginning, the USA was one of the few countries in the world to boycott the International Criminal Tribunal which opened this week in Holland.

And a new US law, inspired by George W. Bush, even allows legal steps to be taken against any country which wants to make American soldiers legally responsible – be it in the Hague, the Netherlands, or in Old Europe.