Our children are learning lies

How does thought control work
in societies that call themselves free? Why are famous journalists so
eager, almost as a reflex, to minimise the culpability of a prime
minister who shares responsibility for the unprovoked attack on a
defenceless people, for laying waste to their land and for killing at
least 100,000 people, most of them civilians, having sought to justify
this epic crime with demonstrable lies? What made the BBC’s Mark Mardell
describe the invasion of Iraq as “a vindication for him”? Why have
broadcasters never associated the British or American state with
terrorism? Why have such privileged communicators, with unlimited access
to the facts, lined up to describe an unobserved, unverified,
illegitimate, cynically manipulated election, held under a brutal
occupation, as “democratic”, with the pristine aim of being “free and
fair”? That quotation belongs to Helen Boaden, the director of BBC News.

Have she and the others read no history? Or is the history they
know, or choose to know, subject to such amnesia and omission that it
produces a world-view as seen only through a one-way moral mirror? There
is no suggestion of conspiracy. This one-way mirror ensures that most
of humanity is regarded in terms of its usefulness to “us”, its
desirability or expendability, its worthiness or unworthiness: for
example, the notion of “good” Kurds in Iraq and “bad” Kurds in Turkey.
The unerring assumption is that “we” in the dominant west have moral
standards superior to “theirs”. One of “their” dictators (often a former
client of ours, such as Saddam Hussein) kills thousands of people and
he is declared a monster, a second Hitler. When one of our leaders does
the same he is viewed, at worst, like Blair, in Shakespearean terms.
Those who kill people with car bombs are “terrorists”; those who kill
far more people with cluster bombs are the noble occupants of a
“quagmire”.

Historical amnesia can spread quickly. Only ten
years after the Vietnam war, which I reported, an opinion poll in the
United States found that a third of Americans could not remember which
side their government had supported. This demonstrated the insidious
power of the dominant propaganda, that the war was essentially a
conflict of “good” Vietnamese against “bad” Vietnamese, in which the
Americans became “involved”, bringing democracy to the people of
southern Vietnam faced with a “communist threat”. Such a false and
dishonest assumption permeated the media coverage, with honourable
exceptions. The truth is that the longest war of the 20th century was a
war waged against Vietnam, north and south, communist and non-communist,
by America. It was an unprovoked invasion of the people’s homeland and
their lives, just like the invasion of Iraq. Amnesia ensures that, while
the relatively few deaths of the invaders are constantly acknowledged,
the deaths of up to five million Vietnamese are consigned to oblivion.

What
are the roots of this? Certainly, “popular culture”, especially
Hollywood movies, can decide what and how little we remember. Selective
education at a tender age performs the same task. I have been sent a
widely used revision guide for GCSE modern world history, on Vietnam and
the cold war. This is learned by 14- to-16-year-olds in our schools. It
informs their understanding of a pivotal period in history, which must
influence how they make sense of today’s news from Iraq and elsewhere.

It
is shocking. It says that under the 1954 Geneva Accord: “Vietnam was
partitioned into communist north and democratic south.” In one sentence,
truth is despatched. The final declaration of the Geneva conference
divided Vietnam “temporarily” until free national elections were held on
26 July 1956. There was little doubt that Ho Chi Minh would win and
form Vietnam’s first democratically elected government. Certainly,
President Eisenhower was in no doubt of this. “I have never talked with a
person knowledgeable in Indo-Chinese affairs,” he wrote, “who did not
agree that . . . 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the
communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.”

Not only did the United
States refuse to allow the UN to administer the agreed elections two
years later, but the “democratic” regime in the south was an invention.
One of the inventors, the CIA official Ralph McGehee, describes in his
masterly book Deadly Deceits how a brutal expatriate mandarin,
Ngo Dinh Diem, was imported from New Jersey to be “president” and a fake
government was put in place. “The CIA,” he wrote, “was ordered to
sustain that illusion through propaganda [placed in the media].”

Phoney
elections were arranged, hailed in the west as “free and fair”, with
American officials fabricating “an 83 per cent turnout despite Vietcong
terror”. The GCSE guide alludes to none of this, nor that “the
terrorists”, whom the Americans called the Vietcong, were also southern
Vietnamese defending their homeland against the American invasion and
whose resistance was popular. For Vietnam, read Iraq.

The tone
of this tract is from the point of view of “us”. There is no sense that a
national liberation movement existed in Vietnam, merely “a communist
threat”, merely the propaganda that “the USA was terrified that many other countries might become communist and help the USSR – they didn’t want to be outnumbered“, merely that President Lyndon B Johnson “was determined to keep South Vietnam communist-free”
(emphasis as in the original). This proceeds quickly to the Tet
Offensive of 1968, which “ended in the loss of thousands of American
lives – 14,000 in 1969 – most were young men”. There is no mention of
the millions of Vietnamese lives also lost in the offensive. And America
merely began “a bombing campaign”: there is no mention of the greatest
tonnage of bombs dropped in the history of warfare, of a military
strategy that was deliberately designed to force millions of people to
abandon their homes, and of chemicals used in a manner that profoundly
changed the environment and the genetic order, leaving a once-bountiful
land all but ruined.

This guide is from a private publisher, but
its bias and omissions reflect that of the official syllabuses, such as
the syllabus from Oxford and Cambridge, whose cold war section refers
to Soviet “expansionism” and the “spread” of communism; there is not a
word about the “spread” of rapacious America. One of its “key questions”
is: “How effectively did the USA contain the spread of communism?” Good
versus evil for untutored minds.

“Phew, loads for you to learn
here . . .” say the authors of the revision guide, “so get it learned
right now.” Phew, the British empire did not happen; there is nothing
about the atrocious colonial wars that were models for the successor
power, America, in Indonesia, Vietnam, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, to
name but a few along modern history’s imperial trail of blood of which
Iraq is the latest.

And now Iran? The drumbeat has already
begun. How many more innocent people have to die before those who filter
the past and the present wake up to their moral responsibility to
protect our memory and the lives of human beings?