It's always reassuring to see John Pilger surface in this newspaper whenever the world is in crisis, as he did last week. Not merely is it proof of The Irish Times's culture of tolerance, but it is also a reminder for those of us without any adolescents about the place how very tiresome and illogical teenagers can be as they bawl their self-righteous non-sequiturs.
This is disagreeable enough when the subject is something domestic, but it is testing to one's blood pressure in the extreme when the issue is 6,000 dead innocents, burned and butchered alive in their workplace.
Let us proceed firstly with a favourite Pilgerine obsession: that there is a conspiracy in the media which prevents the truth about the US from being publicised. The power of US fundamentalism is the greatest source of terror in the world, he says, adding: "This fact is censored from the Western media, whose coverage at best minimises the culpability of imperial powers."
He goes on: "Western terror is part of the recent history of imperialism, a word that journalists dare not write or speak." Excuse me; but where is this newspaper located? Turkmenistan or Ireland? Are we not part of the Western media? If we are, why did we print his ridiculous tirade? Why did the censor not stop it? Who are the censors in all the other Irish newspapers? Who are they in the British press, especially in left-leaning newspapers such as the Independent and Guardian? And what craven lickspittles all journalists must be in those publications to endure the censorship of this central truth about the US, which Pilger alone has the courage to proclaim.
Tiresome at best
Now to have the indepedence and integrity of professional journalists everywhere impugned like this - with the exception of our John - would be tiresome at the best of times; in the context of the 6,000 dead of the US, his swaggering is cynical and vainglorious dementia.
The broad thrust of his article - if such a farrago of unconnected, self-preening accusations could be said to have anything resembling a "thrust" - was that the Islamic peoples, far from being the terrorists of the world, were principally the victims of US fundamentalist terrorism. In what he clearly imagines is an argument in favour of this proposition, he also charges that the US armed and trained the Taliban.
Muslim democracy
Now which one is it, John? If the US is so fundamentally opposed to Islam, how and why did it help the Taliban? Is it because its anti-commmunist realpolitik enabled it (foolishly in my view) to give aid to a Muslim anti-communist organisation? If the US is fundamentally anti-Islamic, why did it arm and train Pakistan for years? If the US is fundamentally anti-Islamic, why did it uniquely come to the aid of Bosnia's Muslims? If the US is so fundamentally anti-Islamic, why is the greatest Muslim democracy, Turkey, such a close ally? If the US is fundamentally anti-Islamic, why is its closest ally in the Middle East the country which guards the Holy Places?
I'm not going to pretend that US foreign policy is based on on anything other than self-interest. Enlightened self-interest is the engine for all foreign policy everywhere. So it's not the US's role on this planet to introduce democracy where it doesn't exist, and the war it fought 10 years ago was not to restore democracy in Kuwait, but to restore oil supplies to the West, and to prevent them falling into the hands of a man who is clinically mad. These are not bad grounds for fighting a war, by the way: oil is the basis for world prosperity, and the first countries to feel the pinch when oil prices rise are not in the rich West, but in Africa. If you haven't got diesel, you haven't got an economy.
In his trawl through history, our hero is of course able to find occasions when US policy permitted or organised dreadful deeds; but only illogic of a hysterically undergraduate variety could connect Operation Phoenix of 1965, in which 50,000 alleged communists were murdered by CIA agents in Vietnam, with Manhattan in 2001.
What precisely the British war against communists in Malaya in the 1950s is doing in his case against the US, I cannot imagine. No matter. Just ask Malayans or Singaporeans today whether they are glad they were saved by the British from a takeover by communist terrorists, acting on Mao's orders, half a century ago, and they will unanimously tell you they are delighted.
Harsh methods were used by the British, but overall, British tactics were nothing like as murderous as those used by the communists. It was a war, not a tennis match, and the good guys won. No one maintains that the society which resulted is perfect; but it is a Muslim democracy which could only have come about by a defeat of the communist forces which were to make economic graveyards of half the world.
Sanctions on Iraq
Naturally, the Pilger bilge includes the fiction that UN sanctions are causing babies to die in Iraq, when it is Saddam's theft of food to feed his army which is causing the calamity there. But we can expect neither accuracy nor insight from a man who apparently thinks he is the only honest journalist in the world.
He is nothing of the kind - merely a conceited and posturing windbag, a buffoon with a bladder to whom we occasionally give hospitality, in order that he may insult and bore us in equal measure.