Three Years of Confronting Western Propaganda

Prosecuting Crimes against Humanity

The promulgation of International law addressing crimes against humanity was one of the major legal achievements resulting from World War II. As Robert Jackson, the lead American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials put it, the crimes bred by that conflict were “so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

Crimes against humanity include government-initiated or -assisted policies or practices resulting in massacre, dehumanization, unjust imprisonment, extrajudicial punishments, torture, racial/ethnic persecution, and other such acts. In reference to the last-cited crime, in 1976 the United Nations General Assembly declared the systematic persecution of one racial group by another (for instance, the practice of apartheid) to be a crime against humanity.

Part II – Undermining the Law

Given the origins of this body of law, it comes as a shock that there are now a number of countries that would like to weaken, and perhaps even do away with, this category of law. These states claim that terrorism, and the so-called war against it, have changed the international environment so greatly that laws designed to protect us all from crimes against humanity are now tying the hands of those who regard terrorism as the present greatest threat to civilization.

While this argument may have some headway with certain governments and populations, it is a distortion of facts and a mangling of history. The vast majority of crimes against humanity require a level of organization and force only found with the state. This fact was brought out during World War II to such a degree that it could no longer be ignored. On the other hand, the crimes of small groups of terrorists may indeed be heinous, but even at their worse, they do not come close, in terms of numbers affected, to the crimes of states. For governments to decry laws attempting to rein in their own major crimes as impediments against their efforts to battle those perpetrating, in comparison, relatively lesser crimes, is more propaganda than truth.

Part III – The Israeli Contribution

Take for example the State of Israel. The fact that Israel is among those states, perhaps the main state, attempting to do away with the laws protecting us all from crimes against humanity should come as yet another shock. How can a state that loudly proclaims that its reason for being is the protection of all Jews, seek to undermine laws that were, in good part, promulgated in response to the brutal persecution of Jews?

Part of the answer to this question may have to do with the fact that Israel does not represent all Jews, but only those who adhere to the Zionist ideology – the ideology of the Israeli state – and it is with the well-being of these Jews that the state appears most concerned. As for the alleged danger to all Jews (for instance, the resurgence of anti-Semitism), one suspects that Israel’s leaders use this as a pretense to pursue policies and practices relevant only to the State of Israel and its guiding ideology. And these policies and practices happen to consistently contravene the laws proscribing crimes against humanity.

The Israelis are not very secretive about this. Take, for instance, Moshe Yaalon, the present Israeli Defense Minister and one of those actively working against international law referencing crimes against humanity. At a recent conference entitled “Towards a New Law of War,” sponsored by Shurat HaDin (an organization of Israeli lawyers operating internationally to defend Israeli military and civilian practices which violate international law), Yaalon declared that in any future with conflict with Lebanon, Israel “will hurt Lebanese civilians including kids of the family … . We did it in the Gaza Strip, we are going to do it in any round of hostilities in the future.” His excuse for this criminal position is that organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas allegedly hide their soldiers and weapons in densely populated urban areas. However, journalists on the ground have found this to be false. Yaalon also held out the prospect of using nuclear weapons against Iran sometime in the future. The fact that present international law holds such actions to be crimes against humanity is the reason Israel seeks to undermine such law and create a “new law of war.”

Another indicator that Israel will continue to defy this aspect of international law is the recent appointment of Ayelet Shaked as Minister of Justice in the newly formed government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Shaked has declared that Israel is at war with the entire Palestinian people and therefore they all should be destroyed, “including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.” Shaked is a deceptively innocent-looking woman. Her behavior, however, calls to mind Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray.


Part IV – The West Gives a Green Light

Major Western nations seem ready to support Israel in this effort, even though it clearly encourages a new era of state-sponsored barbarism. For instance, the U.S. government has consistently protected Israel’s criminal behavior from United Nations condemnation by using its veto in the Security Council. The British government has restricted the use of “universal jurisdiction,” an aspect of international law that allows victims of war crimes to initiate prosecution against responsible individuals in any country that is a signatory of the Geneva Conventions. In order to exempt indictable Israelis, the UK has declared that only its Director of Public Prosecutions (always a politically malleable individual), rather than trial judges confronted with strong evidence, can issue universal jurisdiction arrest warrants. The governments of Canada and several European states are attempting to criminalize the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement which seeks to pressure a change in Israeli policies toward Palestinians. And on it goes.

Part V – Conclusion

The average citizen is either ignorant of or misinformed about the growing danger to an aspect of international law that protects us all. And that is too bad, because it is the average citizen who will always suffer the most from the commission of crimes against humanity.

Beyond the dangers of ignorance and misinformation, there is the ongoing problem of nationalism. The laws allowing for the prosecution of those who commit crimes against humanity were instituted at a time when most nations were so mindful of the barbarism of World War II that their leaders were willing to let go of a bit of their national sovereignty to create potentially meaningful international law. However, they would not go so far as to create an international police force with truly independent operating powers.

It has been seventy years since the end of World War II and nationalism is as strong as ever, while the memory of its barbaric capabilities has faded – despite isolated reminders offered by the multitude of small wars that come and go almost yearly.

So we are embedded in a cycle of violence, led astray by our faulty memories and national hatreds. By now we should know better, but we don’t.

Lawrence Davidson is a retired professor of history from West Chester University in West Chester PA. His academic research focused on the history of American foreign relations with the Middle East. He taught courses in Middle East history, the history of science and modern European intellectual history.
After my two days marathon discussion with Noam Chomsky, (at MIT in 2012), a bestselling book was born. Later this year a film will hit the cinemas.

Noam and I discussed Western imperialism, and the terror it has been spreading around the world. After WWII, at least 50 million lives were lost. Lives of those whom Orwell used to call “unpeople”; lives brutally interrupted as a result of Western-led and orchestrated wars, invasions, coups and proxy-conflicts.

We discussed at length the Western propaganda, which, for centuries, worked extremely hard to justify everything from the colonialist insanity, to supremacist and exceptionalist theories.

After my encounter with Chomsky, I decided to dedicate at least two years of my life to visiting most parts of the world, where the Empire had been striking; where it was attempting to bulldoze all opposition that was standing on its way to the absolute control over the planet.

My goal was Quixotic - a monster, 1000-page book, exposing and confronting techniques and dogmas utilized by the Empire in all corners of the globe, for purposes of destabilizing “rebellious” nations, overthrowing “unruly” governments, or simply grabbing natural resources.

As a philosopher and investigative journalist, I was aiming at both defining how the Western dogmas and propaganda work, and at giving concrete examples of the horror into which our planet was once again descending.

In the past, I have lived and worked on all continents, from Oceania to South America, North America, Africa, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Throughout the years, I became convinced that the natural development of the human race was interrupted, derailed and forced into dark alleys by extremely selfish, perverse group of people and the states, which I call The Empire.

The Empire is “fundamentalist”; it believes, religiously, in its cultural and racial superiority. It is convinced that dominating the world is its sacred right. To achieve its goal, it is using imperialism, colonialism and savage neoliberalism. It is willing to sacrifice millions, tens of millions of human lives to achieve its goals.

I witnessed its crimes on all continents. And I finally realized that it is my duty to define its actions and deceits.

Soon I decided on the title of my book: “Exposing Lies of The Empire”.

It is clear that the Empire lies and that it uses some of its best brains to spread fabrications, as well as billions of dollars in cold cash. It is because the arrangement of the world is grotesque and thoroughly absurd. And only propaganda, shaped to perfection, can guarantee that status quo is maintained. Propaganda and submissiveness of a brainwashed population (in the West), which accepted such propaganda in exchange for at least relatively privileged position in the world.

I talked to Westerners in Paris, London and New York, and I was stunned how little “freedom” there really is, how intellectually cowardly the citizens of the Empire are. In hundreds of art galleries of Paris, I encountered almost no political art, nothing that would make people dream of a better world. In Europe, the level of knowledge about the ‘surrounding world’ (that very same world which basically feeds the continent) was close to zero. Very little was known about the crimes that the Empire is committing.

Europeans are self-promoters, defining themselves as educated and refined, but well over 99 percent of those I challenged could not name even one Korean writer, or Japanese painter, of Chinese classical musicians. Any elementary school kid in Beijing or Tokyo can produce dozens of names of Western cultural icons from the top of their head.

China is different. It is obsessed with knowledge! I spent days in Beijing and Shanghai theatres, opera houses and galleries. I spoke at Tsinghua University (they ran a 2-day seminar on my work) in order to understand Chinese students better. I drove some 5,000 kilometers all around China. I always knew that the Western media has been openly and shamelessly spreading lies about the PRC, trying to shout loudly and continuously, that China is not a socialist country, anymore. In fact, anybody who knows it well can testify that it is socialist and its tremendous success derives from this very fact.

I visited North Korea, as it was celebrating its 60th anniversary of victory. I spent time talking to North Korean citizens, from farmers and workers, to artists, even to the Vice President. I was enormously impressed – by the housing, public transportationKorea, than in the North. Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun interviewed me on the subject, but no Western mainstream publication would run such a story.

I was writing my book as I went: each country smeared by the Empire and “rehabilitated” by me – one chapter. A story about some outrageous lie – another chapter...

Zimbabwe – I read in the Economist and on the BBC site that crime there is endemic, that there are no functioning operation theatres in Harare’s hospitals, that Harare is “the worst city on earth”. I went. All lies. There were dozens of operation theatres in several hospitals. After Nairobi where I was then living, and after Kampala and Kigali where I was often working - three darlings of Western imperialism, as Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya have been plundering and ravishing the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Somalia on behalf of Washington, Paris and London - Harare felt safe, beautiful, cultural; the capital of the country with the highest literacy rate in Africa. While in Nairobi, more than half of the people live in appalling slums and misery, I found only about one square kilometer of slums in Harare.

South Africa, struggling to shake off its terrible legacy of apartheid, is another target of negative Western propaganda. It is because the country is, despite many hindrances, still marching forward, inspired by the left-wing ideology.

Parallel to writing my book, I was filming several documentary films for TeleSur and PressTV, to keep afloat. I went all “around Syria”, where NATO trained and financed “Syrian opposition”, including ISIS, in the refugee camps of Jordan and Turkey. I travelled to Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The West destabilized, ravished one of the greatest countries of the Middle East, as it ravished the entire region.

I worked in Bahrain and Iraq where, at some point I stood on the bridge blown up by ISIS, looking at two villages bombed to the ground by the US, the city of Mosul only six kilometers away. All actors of this bloody, nightmarish drama were actually related or produced by the Empire’s “foreign policy”, or were part of the Empire themselves.

Lies of the Empire are piling on top of each other. “India, the largest democracy”! Anyone who knows this country, even my luminous Indian friends like writer Arundhati Roy (author of The God of Small Things) and documentary film-maker Sanjay Kak, feel unwell hearing this cliché. India is free only for the elites. It is built on the “ideals” of British colonialism. I call it “securistan”.

In my book, I am showing examples how the Empire tries to destroy Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Eritrea, China, South Africa, and Iran – through outrageous propaganda and through manufacturing of the “opposition movements”. Last year I spent two weeks in Hong Kong trying to understand how the brains of local students work, how they were indoctrinated, and made to fall for the Western dogmas, how they are made to antagonize China. The parallel with the strategy that the Empire is using in order to destabilize and smear Cuba, Venezuela and Russia was striking.

I drove all around Ukraine, realizing how close most of the people there felt towards Russia. I talked to workers at the city of Krivoi Rog, to grandmas in the countryside, to students in Kharkov and Odessa: the West created the conflict in Ukraine and pushed it to complete absurdity, dividing two great nations with virtually the same culture.

I also studied environmental destruction in Oceania and Indonesia. In Micronesia, entire nations may have to be soon evacuated because of the global warming. I wrote entire book on the topic, several years ago, but “Exposing Lies of the Empire” is also touching this shocking subject. All over the Oceania, the Empire created “culture of dependence”, and destroyed enormous old and fascinating civilization.

“Exposing Lies of The Empire” is now in print, but I do not feel that the journey is over. 822 pages (the printing house could not accept 1.000 pages and the font had to be changed) is actually very little, comparing to thousands of horrendous stories that the Empire is triggering all over the world.

There is no time to take a break. Pseudo-reality and outright lies of the Western imperialism have to be confronted.

By Lawrence Davidson