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HATE
FOR PROFIT - YOUR INVESTMENTS MAY FUND AMERICA-BASHING BRIT RAG
By JONATHAN FOREMAN
January 31, 2003
America is the new Nazi Germany, and George W. Bush the new Hitler - according to a front page article in the London Daily Mirror, a newspaper partly owned by U.S. companies.
Since the 9/11 attacks, the paper has been a mouthpiece for some of the most venomous anti-Americanism in Europe - indeed, it was the first mainstream media organization to claim that Guantanamo Bay detainees were being "tortured."
But on
Wednesday the Mirror's bile reached a new low with the assertion that
"the current American elite is the Third Reich of our times, although
this distinction ought not to let us forget that they [sic] have merely
accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting American state terrorism
. . . "
Accompanied by a photograph of Tony Blair with bloodied hands, it was written by John Pilger, an expatriate Australian journalist who has long specialized in demonizing the United States.
In the 1970s and '80s, Pilger was so notorious for ideologically motivated dishonesty that British journalists took to referring to ludicrously exaggerated or biased reporting as "pilgering."
But the Mirror's editor, Piers Morgan, last year decided to make Pilger the tabloid's star columnist and ideological mainstay, rendering him newly respectable. He is now the loudest anti-American and anti-war voice in the United Kingdom, and his articles reach an audience of millions.
Pilger's feverish anti-Americanism is a slightly cruder version of the theology promoted by U.S. academic Noam Chomsky, for whom the United States is the root of all global evil.
A typical Pilger piece goes something like this (from The Guardian): "Having swept the Palestinians into the arms of the supreme terrorist Ariel Sharon, the Christian Right fundamentalists running the plutocracy in Washington now replenish their arsenal in preparation for an attack on the 22 million suffering people of Iraq."
Note not only the hysterical jargon, but the false concern for the people of Iraq.
There is something almost comical about the cliched Marxist language and content of statements like "the Washington regime of George W. Bush is now totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of 'endless war' . . . are a matter of record."
But it really isn't all that funny that a major paper should render this sort of thing mainstream and respectable. Especially when (in the same article) Pilger goes on to liken the State of the Union speech to "that other great moment in 1938 when Hitler called his generals together and told them 'I must have war.' "
Pilger may be as blind to the vileness of the comparison as he is to Saddam Hussein's oppression and genocide of Iraqis. But surely his editor must see the monstrous irony entailed in labeling "Nazis" those who, like Bush, want to overthrow a regime that has in fact used poison gas to murder its own civilians.
It is true that the Mirror also prints columns by writers like Christopher Hitchens who favor war to overthrow Saddam. But these pieces don't represent the viewpoint of the paper and are not put on the front page. Nor do such pro-war articles mirror or in any way balance the kind of extremism that likens the Bush administration to the Third Reich.
The largest shareholders in the Mirror's parent company, Trinity Mirror, are all American: the mutual-fund giant Fidelity (12 percent), the Capital Group (13 percent), and the New York based fund Tweedy Browne & Co. (6 percent). (Efforts last night to contact the companies mentioned here were unsuccessful.)
All three U.S. firms were reported to have been angered by a previous front-page attack last July in which Pilger, with the blessing of editor Morgan, called Bush a "criminal," the boss of "the world's leading rogue state," and again likened the United States to Nazi Germany. Given that this vile comparison seems to represent the official point of view of the Mirror, those companies should now seriously reconsider their investment. And U.S. firms that advertise in the Mirror like Toys 'R' Us, AOL, Dell Computer, 20th Century Fox and the Ford Motor Co. might also want to re-evaluate their relationship to the newspaper.
This is not a question of censorship. Pilger may be a dimwitted fanatic whose head is crammed with leftover outrage from the Vietnam War and a lot of tired New Left cant about neo-imperialism, but he's of course entitled to hold and propagate his views. And if Piers Morgan believes against all the evidence that he can benefit his paper's fortunes against its competitors - which include the Sun (owned, like The Post, by News Corp.) - by taking extreme positions against the Blair government and America, he should be free to do so.
But there is no obligation for Americans or U.S. corporations to subsidize such opinions.
After all, investors can and should think carefully about the moral and political import of their investments. This was true during the days of the South African divestment campaign, and it should be true when it comes to organs of opinion that objectively side with America's enemies and in all seriousness liken the United States to Nazi Germany.
This is a comparison that defames those who died fighting Hitler and defames those whom he slaughtered.
And no
American should profit from such slander.