Forcing down Evo Morales's plane was an act of air piracy
Denying the Bolivian president air space was a metaphor for the gangsterism
that now rules the world
*
* * John Pilger
* The Guardian, Thursday 4 July 2013 14.00
President Morales
arrives back in La Paz, Bolivia. ‘Imagine the response from Paris if the French
president's plane was forced down in Latin America.’ Photograph: Zuma/Rex
Features
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.
www.johnpilger.com
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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