Proof of Massive Anglo-American Media Lying Over Iraq

Proof has been obtained of massive UK and US mainstream media lying over Iraq.

The startling NEW evidence has not come per se from the research of brilliant humanist writers such as John Pilger, Noam Chomsky, George Monbiot, Arundhati Roy and Tariq Ali -” although these great writers have long exposed the dishonesty of mainstream media.

This appalling secret has not been revealed by a latter-day Deep Throat connected with the top management of Anglo-American mainstream global mass media.

No – the source of this new evidence of massive media fraud has come from readily Web-accessible archives – with a bit of unwitting help from the extremely dangerous but talkative US Administration handmaiden, prospective US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The “smoking gun” revealing this gross abuse of journalistic ethics and of billions of news consumers throughout the world has come from the publicly-accessible archives of major iconic Anglo newspapers and the search robots of Google.

Lying typically occurs in two ways, namely lying by commission and lying by omission. A simple search of newspaper archives and Google has rapidly revealed proof of massive Anglo-American media lying by both means -” by sustained reporting of a huge, war-promoting LIE (the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq) and almost comprehensive failure to report a huge TRUTH about the biggest avoidable disaster in human history (the 0.9 billion post-1950 global under-five infant mortality).

The Big Lie of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq

Two years ago millions of decent, thoughtful people around the world were properly sceptical about the Anglo-American allegations of the existence of WMDs in Iraq. The only major lines of evidence readily available to help sensible and humane people to this judgement were as follows: outright denials from the expert Iraq weapons inspector Scott Ritter; rather less enthusiastic and confused evidence against the existence of WMDs from weapons inspection bosses Hans Blix and Richard Butler; the absence of hard, incontrovertible physical evidence; the long record of entrenched mendacity by the major Anglo-American Administrations and Establishments; and, most telling of all, the failure of the Israeli airforce to unilaterally destroy any such conceivable threats to the existence or safety of Israel (as they had in 1981 with the bombing of the French-supplied Iraqi Osiraq nuclear reactor near Baghdad).

Nevertheless the hard-nosed journalists, editors and bosses of mainstream Anglo-American media concluded otherwise, reported otherwise in the face of this compelling evidence -” and the immense UK-US military juggernaut that was being prepared for the invasion of Iraq inevitably continued on its course with the resultant, otherwise-avoidable deaths (so far) of 388,000 Iraqis (as estimated from data published by the UN and in the top British medical journal The Lancet (October 2004) -” for detailed accounts search major alternative media sources for articles by Gideon Polya linked on my website.[1]

There was an immense, obvious and resolutely IGNORED philosophic flaw in the Anglo-American Administration, Establishment and Media position over the alleged but not confirmed WMDs, namely that in science “you cannot prove a negative” (thus you cannot prove that Bush and Blair are NOT emissaries of Satan or that Condoleezza Rice does NOT intend to overthrow the US Constitution). In the absence of concrete evidence, the existence of WMDs remains unproven. The proposition that Iraqi WMDs did NOT exist was unprovable by ordinary World citizens -” and indeed could only be resolved to reasonable satisfaction.by minute inspection within Iraq, a process deliberately terminated by the US before the invasion of that sorry country.

After nearly 2 years of intensive investigation, US experts have now produced an interim report on the existence of WMDs in Iraq that confesses that NONE have been found. Prospective US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has now officially confirmed the non-existence of Saddam Hussein’s alleged WMDs in answering questions on the first day of her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “Yes, we thought he had stockpiles, which he did not have. We had problems with the intelligence” (The Age, Melbourne, 20 January, 2005) [2].

As we all know, this BIG LIE – that has so far killed about 0.4 million Iraqis – was massively reported and subscribed to by UK-US mass media. However before attempting to quantitate how World English-speaking sources, and the Anglo-American mass media in particular, reported this BIG LIE, we should first consider a HUGE TRUTH that Anglo-dominated global media have OVERWELMINGLY refused to report -” the largely avoidable, 0.9 billion post-1950 global under-5 infant mortality.

The Horrendous Truth of 0.9 Billion Post-1950 Global Under-5 Infant Deaths

Using publicly-available data from the United Nations (UN) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), I have calculated the post-1950 under-five infant mortality for every country and region in the world. The calculations are straightforward: once you know, for a given year and country, the population, the birth rate and the under-5 infant mortality as a percentage of live births, you can simply calculate the under-5 infant deaths for any post-1950 year for that country. You can then simply add up the data to obtain the total under-5 infant mortality for every country and region in the World since 1950.

The results are horrendous. Thus since 1950 the total under-5 infant mortality has been 0.9 billion for the World, 0.84 billion for the non-European World and about 0.4 billion for the Muslim World. About 90% of this appalling under-5 infant mortality in Third World countries has been AVOIDABLE.

This horrendous mortality correlates closely with a completely separate estimate of total avoidable mortality (technically, excess mortality) throughout the World since 1950. Excess mortality (avoidable mortality) is the difference between the ACTUAL mortality in a country and the deaths EXPECTED for the same period in a country with the same demographics. I have exhaustively calculated excess (avoidable) mortality for every country in the world since 1950. The total post-1950 excess mortality has been 1.3 billion for the whole World, 1 billion for the Third World and 0.5 billion for the Muslim World – for detailed accounts of this data see links on my website.[1]

Appalled by this horrendous avoidable mortality estimates, over the last year I have attempted to inform the World Media of this carnage but with mixed results in the English-speaking World. Thus the news outlet News Central Asia has ethically reported this matter of avoidable infant mortality and total avoidable mortality, as have Media Monitors, Countercurrents, Sulekha and a range of Alternative Media in Africa, Asia, South America, Australia, US, Canada and the UK. However with mainstream global media the results have been very poor. Thus while avoidable global mass mortality has been reported by some major World newspapers (e.g. the Irish Examiner, the Bangkok Post and the Pakistan newspaper Dawn), as far as I can assess it has been OVERWHELMINGLY IGNORED by the Anglo-American-dominated mainstream global media as described below.

Lying by commission and omission by Anglo-American Mainstream Media

How can we quantitate the extent to which Anglo-American mainstream media have simultaneously massively and slavishly REPORTED the BIG LIE of Weapons of Mass Destruction and yet IGNORED the HORRENDOUS REALITY of the 0.9 billion post-1950 under-5 infant mortality?

One approach to this question is to address global English-language reportage via Google. Doing an Advanced Search on Google for the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” coupled with the world “Iraq” produced 3,150,000 results; the same search for just “weapons of mass destruction” produced 4,090,000 results; and “WMD” produced 3,070,000 results (Google Search, 20 January 2005). In contrast, searches for the terms “under-5 infant mortality” and “under-five infant mortality” yielded results of 397 and 124, respectively – a total of 521, of which 298 resulted from my efforts to tell the truth to the World.

These very disappointing results for the global differential reporting of LIES and TRUTH have to be compared with some kind of relatively innocent, mortality-neutral reportage that (in the parlance of Molecular Biology experimentation on Differential Gene Expression) can be called “house-keeping” or “control” results. Thus Advanced Google Searches for the Anglo-Australian entertainer “Kylie Minogue” and the American entertainers “Britney Spears” and “Barbra Streisand” yielded results of 2,280,000, 8,740,000 and 853,000, respectively.

Top American reportage was assessed by searching the Article Archives of the New York Times (“all the news that’s fit to print”) that cover the period from 1 January 1996 to the present. The searches for “WMD” and “weapons of mass destruction” yielded 12 and 192,731 results, respectively (indicating a worthy NYT preference for words as opposed to acronyms); the returns for “under-5 infant mortality” and “under-five infant mortality” were 6,424 and 5,653, respectively; and the “house-keeping” results for “Kylie Minogue”, “Britney Spears” and “Barbra Streisand” were 101, 1,610 and 29,436, respectively (perhaps telling us something about the NYT readership). The reportage on “under-five infant mortality” REALITY (including domestic and international concerns) is only several percent of the reportage of the BIG LIE.

Examining some major UK newspapers we see a somewhat different picture. Archive Search of the ostensibly “liberal” Guardian and Observer newspapers for the period 1 September 1998 onwards yielded the following results: “WMD” (1,459), “weapons of mass destruction” (4,434) and “Kylie Minogue” (651) -” but ZERO for under-5 or under-five infant mortality. Similarly, analysis of the available archived material of the London Times and Sunday Times (from 1 January 1985 to the present) yielded the following results: “WMD” (5), “weapons of mass destruction” (13), “Kylie Minogue” (11) -” and, as with the Guardian and Observer, ZERO for “under-5 infant mortality” and “under-five infant mortality”.

Finally, one can examine the Australian press, specifically the Fairfax Empire that encompasses a variety of media. including the highly-regarded but nevertheless very conservative newspapers the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. Searching the entire Fairfax Archive from 1990 onwards yielded the following results: “WMD” (>200), “weapons of mass destruction” (>200), “Kylie Minogue” (>200), “under-5 infant mortality” (ZERO) and under-five infant mortality” (2, of which one was a letter from the Author, Gideon Polya).

The Reader can investigate his/her favourite major mainstream Anglo-American media that are kind enough to provide searchable archives and hence “smoking guns” of journalistic excesses -” such searches will almost certainly reveal massive journalistic reportage of genocidal Lies of Commission about WMDs and massive Lies of Omission in relation to horrendous global under-5 infant mortality and excess (avoidable) mortality.

Why the Massive Anglo-American Media Lying over Iraq?

The White, European First World had a major 5 century involvement in military aggression, colonial enslavement, genocide and horrendous human mortality throughout the non-European World (e.g. see 3-7). This colonial barbarism variously continued into the post-1950 era. However even in the post-colonial era for many former subject countries, the First World STILL continued to impose negatively through processes variously involving neo-colonialism, malignant interference, militarism, debt, international war, civil war, economic exclusion and economic constraint. In order of decreasing imposition we could rank the main post-1950 perpetrators thus: the US, UK. France, Portugal, Russia and Spain. In this sense the First World powers, and particularly the US and UK, have a major COMPLICITY in the horrendous post-1950 Third World avoidable mortality.

The massive media lying demonstrated here demands public action and expert psychological and social-scientific analysis. Thus a program of Anglo-American “democratic imperialism” (that I would describe as actually “democratic Nazism”) is slowly being unveiled and unleashed. This program is intrinsically racist, imbued with notions of cultural superiority and demands (and substantially receives) “either with me or against me” compliance from an intimidated World. It is a Nation State form of what at the individual level is described as Pathological Narcissism, a very common psychopathy that is prevalent in top political, business and academic management – the Narcissist afflicts others with his self-love, demand for love and admiration, intense insecurity and morbid obsession with punishing those who do not comply.

In the US the prevalence of related attitudes in the dominant culture (albeit generally understated and typically “politically correct” when articulated) has given rise to the academic analysis in many American universities of Whiteness -” the dominant social culture that is characterized by an implicit sense of cultural superiority, massive pressure against critical, dissident comment and general complicity from both White and non-White people comfortably esconced within the System (8). In Nazi Germany such attitudes were explicitly enunciated as Master Race declarations but other Western societies have been rather more subtle. Thus the English Imperialists never really felt the need to explicitly articulate their deeply-felt superiority manifested in 5 centuries of brutal global domination (hence the so English joke that “God is an Englishman”).

Sven Linqvist has provided a profound description of the development of European intellectual (including social-Darwinist) justifications of the barbarity of colonial aggression and genocide that led inevitably to the Nazi atrocities within Europe itself (3). Chalk and Jonassohn have described the extraordinary failure of academic scholars to deal with European genocide throughout the world (4). The famous Indian writer and humanist Arundhati Roy in The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile has succinctly described the problem: “the ultimate privilege of the elite is not just their deluxe lifestyles, but deluxe lifestyles with a clear conscience” (9).

It is quite natural in a tribal sense for the political, media and business leaders of societies to put the best constructions on the actions of their people. However such bias in public reportage should not extend to non-reportage of genocide or other avoidable mass mortality (e.g. the extraordinary non-reportage of horrendous famines in British India up to the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine that killed some 4 million) (5, 6). Indeed Holocaust Denial is illegal in a number of countries including France and Germany.

Yet holocaust denial is exactly what is being practised unashamedly by Western media today. The neo-con “democratic imperialist” agenda is already being applied to Iraq and Afghanistan and there are increasing noises that Syria (an oasis of Islamic-Christian religious tolerance in the Middle East) [10] and populous, increasingly democratic Iran will be “next”. Indeed Condoleezza Rice in her recent interrogation by the US Foreign Relations Committee has menacingly specified Cuba, Burma, North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Zimbabwe for US attention (2).

According to the latest UNICEF report (UNICEF, 2005) [11], the total under-5 infant mortality in 2003 was 110,000 in Coalition-occupied Iraq, 292,000 in Coalition-conquered Afghanistan and 1,000 in the invader and occupier Coalition country, White Australia. This largely-avoidable infant mortality in these war-ravaged, Coalition-violated nations thus totals over 0.4 million PER YEAR -” vastly in excess of the horrendous circa 0.2 million death toll from the recent Indian Ocean tsunami tragedy.

Insistent EXPOSURE of the horrendous human consequences of UK-US “democratic imperialism” (democratic Nazism) is crucially required to halt this carnage and prevent its further extension. Peace is the only way. Exposure, sanctions, bans and boycotts against Anglo-American democratic imperialism (democratic Nazism) is the only way forward for decent humanity. To that end it is vital that everyone recognizes the pervasive, holocaust-denying lying by commission and omission of the Anglo-American-dominated mainstream global media.

References:

[1]. For detailed accounts of global avoidable mass mortality search major alternative media sources for articles by Gideon Polya listed on Media Monitors and on my website: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~gpolya/links.html

[2]. “Condoleezza Rice: Iraq war was right”, The Age, Melbourne, 20 January, 2005)

[3]. Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes (Granta, London, 1997)

[4]. Frank Chalk & Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide. Analysis and Case Studies (Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1990)

[5]. Gideon Polya, Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in global sustainability (Polya, Melbourne, 1998; out of print but available in some major libraries)

[6]. Colin Mason, A Short History of Asia, From the Stone Age to 2000AD (Macmillan, London, 2000)

[7]. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (Jonathan Cape, London, 1997)

[8]. Rajiv Malhotra, Dialog on Whiteness Studies, Sulekha, http://www.sulekha.com/expressions/column.asp?cid=305959

[9]. Arundhati Roy (with David Barsamian), The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile (Harper Perennial, London, 2004).

[10]. William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain (Flamingo, London, 1998)

[11]. UNICEF Website (January 2005).