Richard Falk, professor of international relations at Cornell, once wrote that western foreign policy was formulated “through a self-righteous, one-way moral/legal screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence”.
Of course, the media follow this, reporting most of humanity in terms of its usefulness to western interests (the “international community”). The one-sided slaughter in the Gulf in 1991 was a vast video game with “miraculously few casualties”. Last year’s cluster-bombing of civilians in Yugoslavia was a “humanitarian intervention”. This is not new. In the 1950s, the uprising in Malaya was reported as a heroic British stand against Soviet/Chinese-backed aggression. Only in its secret files did the Foreign Office admit there was no external threat and “the war is very much in defence of [the] rubber industry”.
The Middle East is the cockpit and product of western power. The United States, with Britain at its side, has two strategic goals: to maintain the supply of oil from the Gulf states and to shore up, at any cost, its proxy in the region, Israel. That is the unerring policy; human rights are not an issue. Saudi Arabia, the main oil supplier and Britain’s most important weapons customer, has one of the most repressive regimes on earth; and Israel, by its own record, is a terrorist state.
— source johnpilger.com | john pilger | 30 Oct 2000