Amid today’s Churchillian parades and celebratory speeches, British media and schoolbooks may choose to only remember Churchill’s opposition to dictatorship in Europe, but the rest of the world cannot choose to forget Churchill’s imposition of dictatorship on darker skinned people outside of Europe. Far from being the Lionheart of Britain, who stood on the ramparts of civilisation, Winston Churchill, all too often, simply stood on the wrong side of history.
John Pilger, film-maker and award winning journalist, talks to Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi about the headline events of the year, from CIA torture to the Ukraine crisis. He says the whole tenure of the BBC coverage of the Torture report was ‘does torture work?’ Modern British history is full of torture, and the British were ‘masters’ at it.
The Blood Never Dried was written very much as a response to British participation in the Iraq war and although British troops have been withdrawn from that country, at the time of writing they remain in Afghanistan. Only recently British aircraft have been employed to bomb Libya, the country that has the dubious honor of being the first country to ever experience aerial bombardment, at the hands of the Italians, in 1911. Indeed, the aerial bombardment of 2011, in which the Italians participated, was an unwitting marking of that anniversary. And there are colonial wars still to come which our rulers will dress up as humanitarian interventions or as reluctant responses to “mortal threats” posed by a variety of “enemies,” yesterday Communists, today Islamists, tomorrow….
Countries are “pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world,” wrote Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, in 1898. Nothing has changed. The shopping mall massacre in Nairobi was a bloody façade behind which a full-scale invasion of Africa and a war in Asia are the great game.
What are the chances that Al Qaeda is armed and funded by the US from Afghanistan in the 1980′s, to Libya in 2011, and now Syria to undermine enemies of Wall Street and London, but not in Somalia to undermine neighboring Kenya whose new president won partly due to a popular backlash against the West’s discredited International Criminal Court (ICC)?
The attack on the Westgate Mall is being portrayed by the corporate and capitalist government-controlled media in the U.S. and Europe as a new episode in the so-called “war on terrorism.” Yet the role of the White House through the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) goes without mention.
Parliamentary Intelligence Committee is told: Police’s arrest of witness claiming Woolwich attacker was radicalised by torture, sexual abuse and harassment was “ordered by MI5” by Nafeez Ahmed A letter to the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee by a childhood friend of one of the Woolwich attackers claims that the suspect was subjected to “systematic torture and sexual abuse” by […]
It’s an anthem that is usually sung with chest-thumping pride and misty eyes by British imperialists. “Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves”. This jingoistic celebration of Britain’s former global conquest may yet degenerate into “Rue Britannia, Britannia rues the waves” by Finian Cunningham This is because, as The Guardian newspaper reports this week, the London government has at long last […]
