Full Support for the Lebanese Resistance in its Fight Against Israeli State Terrorism - The War Against Zionism Can Only Be Won with the Overthrow of the US's Client Arab Regimes

 The Iranian Regime Has Demonstrated That It Is A Paper Tiger – Its Rhetoric in Inverse Proportion to its Actions

Last week’s pager attack on Lebanon signalled the beginning of the Lebanon war. It exposed the hypocrisy behind Western denunciations of terrorism. The triggering of explosives in 5,000 pagers, irrespective of whether the target is Hezbollah, fits every definition of terrorism. It killed dozens of civilians, including children.

As Michael Walzer, author of “Just and Unjust Wars” and co-editor of “The Jewish Political Tradition” wrote in the New York Times,

the explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday were also very likely war crimes — terrorist attacks by a state that has consistently condemned terrorist attacks on its own citizens....

the attacks, which killed at least 37 people and wounded thousands of others, came when the operatives were not operating; they had not been mobilized and they were not militarily engaged. Rather, they were at home with their families, sitting in cafes, shopping in food markets — among civilians who were randomly killed and injured.

Terrorism is

the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective.

The definition in Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000 is all but useless.

1.    serious violence against a person;

2.    serious damage to property;

3.    endangering a person's life (other than that of the person committing the action);

4.    creating a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public; and

5.    action designed to seriously interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.

No. 1 could be applied to the Metropolitan Police whose violence is a matter of record.   No. 4 could be applied to the ‘reforms’ to the NHS proposed by Keir Starmer and equally to the privatisation of the NHS by previous Tory governments for the sake of profit.  But of course western governments never think of their actions as ‘terrorist’. If endangering a person’s life is the definition then we should have no standing army!  Not in itself a bad idea.

I would define ‘terrorism’ as the use of violence and terror against a population, for political reasons. The classic non-state terrorist groups are ISIS and Al Qaeda. Groups which have a substantial political base such as the IRA, the ANC and PLO were not terrorist though all of them were called that at the time. Terrorists don’t win elections and don’t have a mass base.

Amnesty International posted this report of Israel’s pager attack:

Another witness who was shopping in the southern Beirut suburb of Borj al-Barajne when she saw women and children screaming and running, described the scenes as apocalyptic. “People were running all around me, but my legs couldn’t move,” she said. She later saw young men lying on the ground and dozens of ambulances arriving.

People were running all around me, but my legs couldn’t move

A witness to a pager explosion in Beirut

Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab analyzed 12 videos showing the pagers exploding in crowded civilian areas, such as residential streets and grocery stores, as well as in people’s homes. A verified video of the skyline of Beirut show large smoke plums over at least 10 locations in residential areas.

Lebanon’s Minister of Health, Dr. Firas Abiad, described the attacks as “the epitome of indiscriminate attacks” adding many caused “life-changing injuries”.

Israel's Bombing of Lebanon - same old story

One witness confirmed to Amnesty International media reports stating the pagers beeped before detonating causing some people to bring them up to their faces to check the screens. A mechanic in Sour described how a friend’s pager started beeping:

He took it in his hands, I was looking at it, and it said ERROR. I turned around to get my cigarettes, and I was still right next to him, and then the pager exploded. He lost his hand and both his eyes.

It is not only Hezbollah fighters who were killed and injured but civilian employees of Hezbollah including health workers. Not that there is any justification for targeting Hezbollah members in this indiscriminate way.

The silence of the world’s leaders – Biden, Starmer, Scholtz etc, is deafening. International law only applies to the enemies of the West, never its friends.  Because there is no doubt that the planting of booby traps is explicitly outlawed.

The use against civilians of booby traps is prohibited by the Protocol on Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices. Article 2 of the 1980 Protocol II to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons provides that a “Booby-trap” means

any device or material which is designed, constructed or adapted to kill or injure, and which functions unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an apparently harmless object or performs an apparently safe act”

It is understandable therefore that Lebanese Resistance, taken by surprise with many of its members injured and killed, has not yet been able to co-ordinate its response to Israel’s savage bombing.

As is normally the case, Israel’s bombing has primarily focused on and killed civilians. Only today the United States announced a further $8.7 aid to Israel. There is no war, no act of aggression, no war crime or atrocity by Israel that the United States will not support.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken simply lied to Congress about reports from the U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance, which concluded that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.

The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known in late April. Because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid, the U.S should have cut off military aid. In fact it expanded it.

Blinken and Biden did not accept either finding. On May 10 Blinken stated to Congress that:

“We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo which described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.

Despite the ruling of the International Court of Justice that Israel was ‘plausibly’ committing genocide and its later order to Israel to halt its offensive in Rafah and the ICJ’s later ruling that Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank were illegal Israel has ignored the rulings of the world’s highest court. International Law has been shown to be completely useless when it comes to preventing genocide because it has no effective mechanism to implement its decisions.

In Lebanon we can also assume that whatever war crimes Israel is planning will also be ignored. Israel’s launching of an aggressive war against Lebanon is a war crime. This issue was considered by The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to be the ‘supreme international crime’. It led the Court to issue 12 death sentences against the major Nazi war criminals in 1947.

To date the Lebanese Resistance, which opened a second front on the border with Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, has been careful to limit its attacks to Northern Israel and military targets whereas Israel has deliberately targeted civilians in South Lebanon as a way of creating a buffer zone.

To date the response of the Lebanese Resistance has been cautious and hesitant given its reported stockpile of 200,000 missiles. Of course it is difficult to know what effect the pager attack has had but it is likely that the resistance is calibrating its response to Israel’s attacks. If this is true it may prove a costly mistake. The longer Israel carries out its bombing campaign the likelier it will be that it destroys the missiles and their launchers.

What is more likely to bring Israel’s military to heel will be the launching of 1,000 or 2,000 missiles a day. The Iron Dome missile defence system would be overwhelmed. Targets need to be widened to cover economic infrastructure such as oil refineries, energy and airports.

The Lebanese Resistance also needs to make it clear that if Israel continues to target civilians then it will not consider itself bound by the Geneva Convention on war. In Gaza Israel has attacked hospitals, schools, churches, mosques – indeed every facet of civilised life. The Resistance cannot afford to show restraint when the word doesn’t even appear in the Zionist dictionary.

Thousands of mosques, churches, homes, restaurants, colleges and other buildings have been turned to rubble across the Gaza Strip as the Israel-Hamas war continues.

What will be crucial also will be the assistance of other Arab groups. With the exception of the Houthis, all Arab states to one degree or another wish to please or come to terms with U.S. imperialism. This includes Iran and Syria. Although Iran’s’ support for Hezbollah in terms of weapons supply has been crucial to their ability to continue to fight Israel, this has been done, not because of solidarity with Lebanon and the Palestinian people but because Iran wishes to extend its influence in the Middle East. Iran has attempted on numerous occasions to try and reach an agreement with the United States, most notably the Nuclear Agreement with President Obama that Trump tore up. It has already made its peace with Saudi Arabia.

Iran’s problem has always been that Israel wants to be the unchallenged hegemon in the region. Because Israel is the United States’ attack dog, whose purpose is to intimidate any radical Arab group or movement, there will never be a chance that the US will agree to its peace feelers. The US harbours a desire to return to the days of the Shah of Iran, who was the US’s favourite dictator.

The Iranian regime is not therefore interested in solidarity for its own sake. It is not a revolutionary or even a progressive regime.  On the contrary it has waged a campaign of terror and oppression against its own people: women, workers, national and religious minorities (Jews are the only exception to this, thus proving the accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ against it are nonsense).

Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran in 1979 with the US’s blessing because the alternative was a revolutionary workers regime. The CIA actually enabled Khomeini at the time although later they fell out. Under Reagan Iran became embroiled in the Iran Contra Scandal when Iran paid for arms the US supplied it with knowing full well that some of the money would fund the Contras, the US-backed terrorists who were then fighting the Sandanistas in Nicargua. Israel too supplied captured PLO weapons to the US in order that the Contras could be armed. 

It is therefore no surprise that the Iranian regime has made it clear that it will not be taking part in any attacks on Israel. It has not responded to the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas chief in Tehran despite its threats at the time.

The one thing that the US does not want is a region wide war because in such a war the complicity of its own Arab client states will become all too clear. Jordan and Saudi Arabia have been supplying Israel with goods bypassing the Houthis blockade on the Red Sea. The involvement of Iraqi Hezbollah, who would almost certainly find themselves in confrontation with King Hussein’s forces might pose a threat to an already unpopular regime. At the same time it will bring into even sharper focus US bases in Jordan and Northern Syria.

The Middle East is dotted with unpopular, repressive dictators and regimes that are in alliance with Israel. A war that sucks in forces across the region cannot but help destabilise those regimes.

In order to defeat Hezbollah Israel needs to wage a ground war as Israeli generals are already threatening. The problem with this is that the Israeli army has already proved wanting in the war against Hamas. Hezbollah fighters are vastly more experienced than Hamas fighters having fought in Syria’s civil war in aid of Syrian dictator, Assad.

In 2006 Israel troops were forced to withdraw from Lebanon when they launched a ground offensive. There is no reason to believe they will fare any better this time around.

Before the war on the Palestinians in Gaza Israel’s military had an undeservedly high reputation as an effective fighting force. But its main role in the past two decades has not been in armed combat but in maintaining a repressive military dictatorship in the West Bank.

Israel is very good at killing civilians but it finds armed opponents a much more difficult proposition. In Gaza the claim that it has lost some 370 soldiers and a few thousand injured are ludicrous. On December 2023 Israel’s claim that 1593 soldiers had been injured was shown to be a lie when Ha’aretz discovered that at the Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon alone 1,949 soldiers had been treated for injuries. Given that most of its tanks and armoured personnel carriers have been put out of action the figures for Israeli military deaths, 346 are ludicrous. It is likely that the Israeli military has lost at least 3,000 and probably more dead and up to 10,000 injured.

Israel’s army is already battle worn. Its reservists are now refusing further call-ups, hence the attempt to draft the Ultra-Orthodox who prefer studying the Talmud to taking part in military adventures to secure the Promised Land.

Others, like Michael Ofer Ziv have refused to fight at the horror of what he has seen.  He described to CNN how

One minute, he was looking at soundless footage of airstrikes he ordered; the next, he was on his phone watching unfiltered videos of Palestinians shrieking, carrying their loved ones who had been killed because of the Israeli military.

“This is happening in real life and has an actual effect on those people… at some point, your brain kind of cannot disconnect those two things anymore,” he said.

Once he connected those dots, there was no going back.

Asked for comment, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told CNN that Ofer Ziv’s claims around targeting were “baseless, unfounded, and misrepresent the sensitivity, precaution, and strict obligation to international law with which the IDF selects and pursues its targets.”

If the Lebanese war does turn into a fully fledged war it could bring the very existence of Israel, as the United States’ settler colonial watchdog, into question. The genocide in Gaza, conducted in the full glare of the international media has destroyed the moral argument for Israel’s existence as a Jewish supremacist state. Our leaders may repeat clichés about ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’ but when pictures of murdered children enter peoples’ living rooms only the brain dead still accept that Gaza’s children pose a threat to a nuclear armed state.

Tony Greenstein

The Disappearance of Investigative and Critical Journalism - The Guardian's 'Slow Witted Viciousness'

From ‘Anti-Semitism’ to Economics – Good Journalists are being replaced by Precocious Windbags & Puffed-up Pundits

You don’t hear too much of John Pilger in the media these days.  There was a time when his films, on the Ethiopian famine or Year Zero about Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Death of a Nation on the genocidal Indonesian occupation of East Timor were headline news but Pilger was too honest and spoke the truth to power once too often.

Just a sample for the hundreds of Guardian articles attacking Jeremy Corbyn - for more try the excellent 5 Filters site -   one of many bogus attacks on Corbyn - there has been no stampede though to apologise for getting it wrong though

Pilger won Britain’s Journalist of the Year Award twice, in 1967 and again in 1979, but he has been slowly frozen out of mainstream journalism – by the New Statesman in 2014 and The Guardian in 2015.  Both the New Statesman and The Guardian have moved to the right as part of the anti-Corbyn hegemony in the bourgeois press, Pilger is a journalistic odd man out.

The Guardian, once the beacon of the liberal left, has been the worst of all.  It has in many ways led the anti-Corbyn movement.  People expect no better from the Daily Mail or Sun, but they do expect better from The Guardian, whose raft of pundits and ‘journalists’ have sung one refrain – Corbyn is not up to it.

Perhaps the most venal, bigoted, narcissistic and all-round stupid is Nick Cohen whose article Don’t tell me you weren’t warned about Corbyn set new standards of idiocy;

To be fair, he was hauled over the coals by the Guardian’s Readers Editor but only because he described his readers as ‘fucking fools’.  Those who refused to give up their support for Jeremy Corbyn were described thus by Cohen:

‘In my respectful opinion, your only honourable response will be to stop being a fucking fool by changing your fucking mind.’ The idea that this idiot could himself be wrong never occurred to him.  So full of self-righteousness was he, admittedly a Guardian journalist’s trait, that Cohen had no doubts about the disaster that was Corbynism:  It was he argued a ‘threat to democracy’ itself not having an opposition worthy of the name. He told us that:

John Pilger receiving the Journalism of the Year Award

‘The Tories have gone easy on Corbyn and his comrades to date for the transparently obvious reason that they want to keep them in charge of Labour.

In an election, they would tear them to pieces. ...  Will there be 150, 125, 100 Labour MPs by the end of the flaying? My advice is to think of a number then halve it. Don’t tell me you weren’t warned about Corbyn

Suffice to say that the pitifully mediocre Nick Cohen continues to scribble away for The Observer whilst a journalist like John Pilger is left writing these days for the alternative press.  Britain’s journalists, almost without exception, have become little more than their proprietors’ prostitutes.

Tony Greenstein

Hold the Front Page: The Reporters are Missing

By John Pilger

September 20, 2018 "Information Clearing House" -  The death of Robert Parry earlier this year felt like a farewell to the age of the reporter. Parry was "a trailblazer for independent journalism", wrote Seymour Hersh, with whom he shared much in common.

Hersh revealed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia, Parry exposed Iran-Contra, a drugs and gun-running conspiracy that led to the White House. In 2016, they separately produced compelling evidence that the Assad government in Syria had not used chemical weapons. They were not forgiven.

Driven from the "mainstream", Hersh must publish his work outside the United States. Parry set up his own independent news website Consortium News, where, in a final piece following a stroke, he referred to journalism's veneration of "approved opinions" while "unapproved evidence is brushed aside or disparaged regardless of its quality." 

Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years. Dissent tolerated when I joined a national newspaper in Britain in the 1960s has regressed to a metaphoric underground as liberal capitalism moves towards a form of corporate dictatorship. This is a seismic shift, with journalists policing the new "groupthink", as Parry called it, dispensing its myths and distractions, pursuing its enemies.

Witness the witch-hunts against refugees and immigrants, the wilful abandonment by the "MeToo" zealots of our oldest freedom, presumption of innocence, the anti-Russia racism and anti-Brexit hysteria, the growing anti-China campaign and the suppression of a warning of world war.

With many if not most independent journalists barred or ejected from the "mainstream", a corner of the Internet has become a vital source of disclosure and evidence-based analysis: true journalism. Sites such as wikileaks.org, consortiumnews.com, ZNet zcomm.org, wsws.org, truthdig.com, globalresearch.org, counterpunch.org and informationclearinghouse.info are required reading for those trying to make sense of a world in which science and technology advance wondrously while political and economic life in the fearful "democracies" regress behind a media facade of narcissistic spectacle.

In Britain, just one website offers consistently independent media criticism. This is the remarkable Media Lens - remarkable partly because its founders and editors as well as its only writers, David Edwards and David Cromwell, since 2001 have concentrated their gaze not on the usual suspects, the Tory press, but the paragons of reputable liberal journalism: the BBC, the Guardian, Channel 4 News.

Their method is simple. Meticulous in their research, they are respectful and polite when they ask why a journalist why he or she produced such a one-sided report, or failed to disclose essential facts or promoted discredited myths.

The replies they receive are often defensive, at times abusive; some are hysterical, as if they have pushed back a screen on a protected species.

I would say Media Lens has shattered a silence about corporate journalism. Like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent, they represent a Fifth Estate that deconstructs and demystifies the media's power.

What is especially interesting about them is that neither is a journalist. David Edwards is a former teacher, David Cromwell is an oceanographer. Yet, their understanding of the morality of journalism - a term rarely used; let's call it true objectivity - is a bracing quality of their online Media Lens dispatches.

I think their work is heroic and I would place a copy of their just published book, Propaganda Blitz, in every journalism school that services the corporate system, as they all do.

Take the chapter, Dismantling the National Health Service, in which Edwards and Cromwell describe the critical part played by journalists in the crisis facing Britain's pioneering health service.

The NHS crisis is the product of a political and media construct known as "austerity", with its deceitful, weasel language of "efficiency savings"  (the BBC term for slashing public expenditure) and "hard choices" (the wilful destruction of the premises of civilised life in modern Britain).

"Austerity" is an invention. Britain is a rich country with a debt owed by its crooked banks, not its people. The resources that would comfortably fund the National Health Service have been stolen in broad daylight by the few allowed to avoid and evade billions in taxes.

Using a vocabulary of corporate euphemisms, the publicly-funded Health Service is being deliberately run down by free market fanatics, to justify its selling-off . The Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn may appear to oppose this, but is it? The answer is very likely no. Little of any of this is alluded to in the media, let alone explained.

Edwards and Cromwell have dissected the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, whose innocuous title belies its dire consequences. Unknown to most of the population, the Act ends the legal obligation of British governments to provide universal free health care: the bedrock on which the NHS was set up following the Second World War. Private companies can now insinuate themselves into the NHS, piece by piece.

Where, asks Edwards and Cromwell, was the BBC while this momentous Bill was making its way through Parliament? With a statutory commitment to "providing a breadth of view" and to properly inform the public of "matters of public policy", the BBC never spelt out the threat posed to one of the nation's most cherished institutions.  A BBC headline said: "Bill which gives power to GPs passes." This was pure state propaganda.

There is a striking similarity with the BBC's coverage of Prime Minister Tony Blair's lawless invasion of Iraq in 2003, which left a million dead and many more dispossessed.   A study by the University of Wales, Cardiff, found that the BBC reflected the government line "overwhelmingly" while relegating reports of civilian suffering. A Media Tenor study placed the BBC at the bottom of a league of western broadcasters in the time they gave to opponents of the invasion. The corporation's much-vaunted "principle" of impartiality was never a consideration.

One of the most telling chapters in Propaganda Blitz describes the smear campaigns mounted by journalists against dissenters, political mavericks and whistleblowers. The Guardian's campaign against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the most disturbing.

Assange, whose epic WikiLeaks disclosures brought fame, journalism prizes and largesse to the Guardian, was abandoned when he was no longer useful. He was then subjected to a vituperative - and cowardly - onslaught of a kind I have rarely known.

With not a penny going to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal. The book's authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a "damaged personality" and "callous". They also disclosed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables.

With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that "Scotland Yard may get the last laugh".

 The Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote, "I bet Assange is stuffing himself full of flattened guinea pigs. He really is the most massive turd."

Moore, who describes herself as a feminist, later complained that, after attacking Assange, she had suffered "vile abuse". Edwards and Cromwell wrote to her: "That's a real shame, sorry to hear that. But how would you describe calling someone 'the most massive turd'? Vile abuse?"

Moore replied that no, she would not, adding, "I would advise you to stop being so bloody patronising."

Her former Guardian colleague James Ball wrote, "It's difficult to imagine what Ecuador's London embassy smells like more than five and a half years after Julian Assange moved in."

Such slow-witted viciousness appeared in a newspaper described by its editor, Katharine Viner, as "thoughtful and progressive". What is the root of this vindictiveness? Is it jealousy, a perverse recognition that Assange has achieved more journalistic firsts than his snipers can claim in a lifetime? Is it that he refuses to be "one of us" and shames those who have long sold out the independence of journalism?

Journalism students should study this to understand that the source of "fake news" is not only trollism, or the likes of Fox news, or Donald Trump, but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it. The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom the Guardian has failed to rehabilitate, is its echo.

"[It is] an age in which people yearn for new ideas and fresh alternatives," wrote Katharine Viner. Her political writer Jonathan Freedland dismissed the yearning of young people who supported the modest policies of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as "a form of narcissism".

"How did this man...", brayed the Guardian's Zoe Williams, "get on the ballot in the first place?" A choir of the paper's precocious windbags joined in, thereafter queuing to fall on their blunt swords when Corbyn came close to winning the 2017 general election in spite of the media.

Complex stories are reported to a cult-like formula of bias, hearsay and omission: Brexit, Venezuela, Russia, Syria. On Syria, only the investigations of a group of independent journalists have countered this, revealing the network of Anglo-American backing of jihadists in Syria, including those related to ISIS.

Supported by a "psyops" campaign funded by the British Foreign Office and the US Agency of International Aid, the aim is to hoodwink the Western public and speed the overthrow the government in Damascus, regardless of the medieval alternative and the risk of war with Russia.

The Syria Campaign, set up by a New York PR agency, Purpose, funds a group known as the White Helmets, who claim falsely to be "Syria Civil Defence" and are seen uncritically on TV news and social media, apparently rescuing the victims of bombing, which they film and edit themselves, though viewers are unlikely to be told this. George Clooney is a fan.

The White Helmets are appendages to the jihadists with whom they share addresses. Their media-smart uniforms and equipment are supplied by their Western paymasters. That their exploits are not questioned by major news organisations is an indication of how deep the influence of state-backed PR now runs in the media. As Robert Fisk noted recently, no "mainstream" reporter reports Syria, from Syria.

In what is known as a hatchet job, a Guardian reporter based in San Francisco, Olivia Solon, who has never visited Syria, was allowed to smear the substantiated investigative work of journalists Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett on the White Helmets as "propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government".

This abuse was published without permitting a single correction, let alone a right-of-reply. The Guardian Comment page was blocked, as Edwards and Cromwell document.  I saw the list of questions Solon sent to Beeley, which reads like a McCarthyite charge sheet - "Have you ever been invited to North Korea?"

So much of the mainstream has descended to this level. Subjectivism is all; slogans and outrage are proof enough. What matters is the "perception".

When he was US commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus declared what he called "a war of perception... conducted continuously using the news media". What really mattered was not the facts but the way the story played in the United States. The undeclared enemy was, as always, an informed and critical public at home.

Nothing has changed. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's film-maker, whose propaganda mesmerised the German public.

She told me the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the "submissive void" of an uninformed public.

"Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?" I asked.

"Everyone," she said. "Propaganda always wins, if you allow it."

Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell is published by Pluto.

Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger