The Real Invasion of Africa is Not News, and a Licence to Lie is Hollywood’s Gift
A full-scale invasion of Africa is
under way. The United States is deploying troops in 35 African
countries, beginning with Libya, Sudan, Algeria and Niger. Reported by
Associated Press on Christmas Day, this was missing from most
Anglo-American media.
The invasion has almost nothing to do
with “Islamism”, and almost everything to do with the acquisition of
resources, notably minerals, and an accelerating rivalry with China.
Unlike China, the US and its allies are prepared to use a degree of
violence demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and
Palestine. As in the cold war, a division of labour requires that
western journalism and popular culture provide the cover of a holy war
against a “menacing arc” of Islamic extremism, no different from the
bogus “red menace” of a worldwide communist conspiracy.
Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa
in the late 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has built a
network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for
American bribes and armaments. Last year, Africom staged Operation
African Endeavor, with the armed forces of 34 African nations taking
part, commanded by the US military.
Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine
embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant
officer. Only pith helmets are missing.
It is as if Africa’s proud history of
liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to
oblivion by a new master’s black colonial elite whose “historic
mission”, warned Frantz Fanon half a century ago, is the promotion of “a
capitalism rampant though camouflaged”.
A striking example is the eastern Congo,
a treasure trove of strategic minerals, controlled by an atrocious
rebel group known as the M23, which in turn is run by Uganda and Rwanda,
the proxies of Washington.
Long planned as a “mission” for NATO,
not to mention the ever-zealous French, whose colonial lost causes
remain on permanent standby, the war on Africa became urgent in 2011
when the Arab world appeared to be liberating itself from the Mubaraks
and other clients of Washington and Europe. The hysteria this caused in
imperial capitals cannot be exaggerated. NATO bombers were dispatched
not to Tunis or Cairo but Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi ruled over
Africa’s largest oil reserves. With the Libyan city of Sirte reduced to
rubble, the British SAS directed the “rebel” militias in what has since
been exposed as a racist bloodbath.
The indigenous people of the Sahara, the
Tuareg, whose Berber fighters Gaddafi had protected, fled home across
Algeria to Mali, where the Tuareg have been claiming a separate state
since the 1960s. As the ever watchful Patrick Cockburn points out, it is
this local dispute, not al-Qaeda, that the West fears most in northwest
Africa… “poor though the Tuareg may be, they are often living on top of
great reserves of oil, gas, uranium and other valuable minerals”.
Almost certainly the consequence of a
French/US attack on Mali on 13 January, a siege at a gas complex in
Algeria ended bloodily, inspiring a 9/11 moment in David Cameron. The
former Carlton TV PR man raged about a “global threat” requiring
“decades” of western violence. He meant implantation of the west’s
business plan for Africa, together with the rape of multi-ethnic Syria
and the conquest of independent Iran.
Cameron has now ordered British troops
to Mali, and sent an RAF drone, while his verbose military chief,
General Sir David Richards, has addressed “a very clear message to
jihadists worldwide: don’t dangle and tangle with us. We will deal with
it robustly” – exactly what jihadists want to hear. The trail of blood
of British army terror victims, all Muslims, their “systemic” torture
cases currently heading to court, add necessary irony to the general’s
words. I once experienced Sir David’s “robust” ways when I asked him if
he had read the courageous Afghan feminist Malalai Joya’s description of
the barbaric behaviour of westerners and their clients in her country.
“You are an apologist for the Taliban” was his reply. (He later
apologised).
These bleak comedians are straight out
of Evelyn Waugh and allow us to feel the bracing breeze of history and
hypocrisy. The “Islamic terrorism” that is their excuse for the enduring
theft of Africa’s riches was all but invented by them. There is no
longer any excuse to swallow the BBC/CNN line and not know the truth.
Read Mark Curtis’s Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam (Serpent’s Tail) or John Cooley’s Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (Pluto Press) or The Grand Chessboard
by Zbigniew Brzezinski (HarperCollins) who was midwife to the birth of
modern fundamentalist terror. In effect, the mujahedin of al-Qaida and
the Taliban were created by the CIA, its Pakistani equivalent, the
Inter-Services Intelligence, and Britain’s MI6.
Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s
National Security Adviser, describes a secret presidential directive in
1979 that began what became the current “war on terror”. For 17 years,
the US deliberately cultivated, bank-rolled, armed and brainwashed
jihadi extremists that “steeped a generation in violence”. Code-named
Operation Cyclone, this was the “great game” to bring down the Soviet
Union but brought down the Twin Towers.
Since then, the news that intelligent,
educated people both dispense and ingest has become a kind of Disney
journalism, fortified, as ever, by Hollywood’s licence to lie, and lie.
There is the coming Dreamworks movie on WikiLeaks, a fabrication
inspired by a book of perfidious title-tattle by two enriched Guardian
journalists; and there is Zero Dark Thirty, which promotes
torture and murder, directed by the Oscar-winning Kathryn Bigelow, the
Leni Riefenstahl of our time, promoting her master’s voice as did the
Fuhrer’s pet film-maker. Such is the one-way mirror through which we
barely glimpse what power does in our name.
For more information on John Pilger, please visit his website at www.johnpilger.com
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