BBC News regularly proclaims its supposed editorial principles of fearless, independent, impartial, fair and accurate journalism. In a January 2023 speech to the Whitehall & Industry Group in London, then BBC Chairman Richard Sharp boasted that BBC journalism is the ‘global gold standard’ of credible news reporting.

Two years previously, in 2021, the public broadcaster had proudly published a focused, 10-point plan to ensure the protection of the highest ‘impartiality, whistleblowing and editorial standards’. BBC director general Tim Davie asserted:

‘The BBC’s editorial values of impartiality, accuracy and trust are the foundation of our relationship with audiences in the UK and around the world. Our audiences deserve and expect programmes and content which earn their trust every day and we must meet the highest standards and hold ourselves accountable in everything we do.’

When it comes to the broadcaster’s coverage of Gaza since October 2023, and long before, BBC audiences have seen for themselves the hollowness of such BBC rhetoric.

For example, the BBC’s withdrawal of its own commissioned powerful documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, earlier this year epitomised how much the UK’s national broadcaster bends to the will of the Israel lobby. The BBC dropped the documentary from iPlayer, soon after it was broadcast on BBC Two on 17 February, when it emerged that the film’s narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah al-Yazuri, is the son of Ayman al-Yazuri, a deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza’s government which is administered by Hamas. The film was withdrawn after a campaign by pro-Israel voices, including David Collier, a self-described ‘100 per cent Zionist’ activist, Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, and Danny Cohen, a former director of BBC television, who said that the broadcaster ‘is at risk of becoming a Hamas propaganda mouthpiece.’

Another documentary, Gaza: Medics Under Fire, made by Oscar-nominated, Emmy and Peabody award-winning filmmakers, including Ben de Pear, Karim Shah and Ramita Navai, has been held back by the BBC, even though it had been signed off by BBC lawyers. The film includes the testimony of Palestinian doctors working in Gaza under Israeli bombardment. It has been ready for broadcast since February after months of editorial reviews and fact-checking.

Over 600 prominent figures from the arts and media, including British film director Mike Leigh, Oscar-winning actor Susan Sarandon and Lindsey Hilsum, the international editor of Channel 4 News, have signed an open letter criticising the BBC for withholding the documentary:

‘We stand with the medics of Gaza whose voices are being silenced. Their urgent stories are being buried by bureaucracy and political censorship. This is not editorial caution. It’s political suppression. The BBC has provided no timeline, no transparency. Such decisions reinforce the systemic devaluation of Palestinian lives in our media.’

This, of course, is all part of an endemic pattern of BBC bias towards Israel under the guise of ‘impartiality’; a façade that has now been obliterated. The corporation’s longstanding, blatant protection of Israel, considered an ‘apartheid regime’ by major human rights organisations, has been particularly glaring since Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government ordered genocidal attacks on Gaza in October 2023.

The public has been subject to repetition and amplification of the Israeli narrative above the Palestinian perspective. Moreover, the broadcaster regularly omits ‘Israel’ from headlines about its latest war crimes committed in Gaza and the West Bank. Another remarkable feature of the BBC’s performance has been the dismissive treatment by senior BBC management of serious concerns about bias raised by their own journalists. A very brief summary of the BBC’s biased reporting on Gaza, and criticism by some of their own journalists, can be found in this thread on X. The essential conclusion concerning BBC News coverage of Gaza, wrote one dissident BBC journalist, is that of:

‘a collapse in the application of basic standards and norms of journalism that seems aligned with Israel’s propaganda strategy.’ [Our emphasis]

BBC management have ignored or dismissed ‘a mass of evidence-based critique of coverage’ from members of staff. So much for the BBC’s claimed commitment to taking whistleblowers seriously.

Karishma Patel, a former BBC researcher, newsreader and journalist, wrote earlier this year about her reasons for leaving the BBC. She observed ‘a shocking level of editorial inconsistency’ in how the BBC covers Gaza. Journalists were ‘actively choosing not to follow evidence’ of Israeli war crimes ‘out of fear’.

In a follow-up article last month, she observed that:

‘many [BBC] journalists are afraid to speak their minds – to challenge editorial decisions or speak freely to powerful presenters and executives. This isn’t a newsroom environment conducive to robust journalism – a profession all about the pursuit of truth and accountability.’

She added:

‘It’s important the public understands how far editorial policy can be silently shaped by even the possibility of anger from certain groups, foreign governments, our own government, mega-corporations – any powerful actor – and how crucial it is that more junior journalists who see it can speak up.’

‘A Precious National Asset’

Last week, the BBC’s director general warned of a disinformation ‘trust crisis’ that was putting ‘the social fabric’ of the UK ‘at risk’. Tim Davie pointed the finger at social media platforms such as TikTok and YouTube where, as a Guardian report on Davie’s speech put it, ‘disinformation can go unchecked’. We have previously written (for example, here and here) about how ‘mainstream’ editors and journalists love to point at social media as prime purveyors of disinformation, diverting attention from their own culpability in much larger crimes of state-approved propaganda that fuels wars, the erosion of democracy and climate catastrophe.

Davie said:

‘The future of our cohesive, democratic society feels for the first time in my life at risk.’

He called for ‘strong government backing’ for the BBC as a ‘precious national asset’ to be ‘properly funded and supported’. The fact that the BBC has itself massively contributed to a ‘trust crisis’ in disinformation and propaganda, encapsulated by its complicity in Israel’s genocide, went unmentioned, of course.

The late, great journalist John Pilger put it succinctly in an interview with Afshin Rattansi:

‘The BBC has the most brilliant production values, it produces the most extraordinary natural history and drama series. But the BBC is, and has long been, the most refined propaganda service in the world.’

Daily examples abound of why the public should regard BBC News with deep scepticism. On 12 May, BBC News at Ten reported the release of US-Israeli dual citizen Edan Alexander by Hamas. Senior BBC reporter Lucy Williamson said that Alexander had originally been ‘kidnapped as a soldier’. The terminology is deceptive: civilians are kidnapped; soldiers are captured. Why did BBC editors approve this loaded use of the wrong word, ‘kidnapped’?

Consider another example. Richard Sanders, an experienced journalist and documentary filmmaker, noted via X on 15 May that the BBC had included this line in one of its news bulletins:

‘Israel says a hospital [in Gaza] along with a university and schools … have become terrorist strongholds for Hamas’.

Sanders commented:

‘The BBC knows such statements are untrue. Yet that sentence took up more than a third of its 22 sec 7.30 am news bulletin on Gaza – with no rebuttal.’

He added:

‘8am they go to [BBC] correspondent Yolande Knell for a lengthier report. She repeats exactly the same sentence – again, with no rebuttal.

‘The listener is left with the entirely false impression it’s perfectly possible it’s true.

‘Bad, bad journalism.’

And yet this is standard BBC ‘journalism’: the ‘global gold standard’, remember.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, is supposedly an exemplar of this gold standard. But his capitulation to the Israel lobby is repeatedly apparent in his interviews and articles. Media activist Saul Staniforth captured this clip where a BBC presenter said to Bowen:

‘[Netanyahu is] looking for other countries to take in Gazans’.

Bowen responded: ‘Well, that’s called…’

He then paused momentarily and continued: ‘… that will be called, by Palestinians and by a lot of people around the world, ethnic cleansing.’

Bowen presumably stopped himself simply stating the truth: ‘that’s called ethnic cleansing.’ This is what he would have said in any context involving an Official Enemy, such as Russia, rather than the Official Friend, Israel.

Jonathan Cook dissected an even more egregious example of Bowen’s favouring the Israeli perspective when the BBC journalist interviewed Philippe Lazzarini, head of United Nations refugee agency UNRWA. Before airing the interview, Bowen introduced the Lazzarini interview with a contorted cautionary statement:

‘Israel says he is a liar, and that his organisation has been infiltrated by Hamas. But I felt it was important to talk to him for a number of reasons.

‘First off, the British government deals with him, and funds his organisation. Which is the largest dealing with Palestinian refugees. They know a lot of what is going on, so therefore I think it is important to speak to people like him.’

As Cook observed, Bowen would never preface an interview with Netanyahu in a similar way:

‘The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, accusing him of crimes against humanity. But I felt it was important to talk to him for a number of reasons.’

During the interview, Lazzarini told Bowen that he was running out of words ‘to describe the misery and the tragedy affecting the people in Gaza. They have been now more than two months without any aid’. The UNRWA chief added:

‘Starvation is spreading, people are exhausted, people are hungry… we can expect that in the coming weeks if no aid is coming in, that people will not die because of the bombardment, but they will die because of the lack of food. This is the weaponisation of humanitarian aid.’

Cook noted:

‘Lazzarini’s remarks on the catastrophe in Gaza should be seen as self-evident. But Bowen and the BBC undermined his message by framing him and his organisation as suspect – and all because Israel, a criminal state starving the people of Gaza, has made an entirely unfounded allegation against the organisation trying to stop its crimes against humanity.’

He continued:

‘This is the same pattern of smears from Israel that has claimed all 36 hospitals in Gaza are Hamas “command and control centres” – again without a shred of evidence – to justify it bombing them all, leaving Gaza’s population without any meaningful health care system as malnutrition and starvation take hold.’ [Our emphasis]

As Cook pointed out, it is quite possible that it was not Bowen’s choice ‘to attach such a disgraceful disclaimer to his interview. We all understand that he is under enormous pressure, both from within the BBC and outside.’ But just imagine the huge moral standing and public impact it would have if Bowen resigned from the BBC, citing the intolerable pressure not to speak the full truth about Israel’s genocide and war crimes.

For those with long memories, recall the exceptional courage and honesty when two senior UN officials, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned in 1998 and 2000, respectively, rather than continue to administer the ‘genocidal’ (their term) UN sanctions against Iraq that had led to the deaths of up to 1.5 million people, including around half a million children under the age of five.

One of the most insidious forms of ‘bad’ BBC ‘journalism’ is propaganda by omission, as we have noted in media alerts over the years (for example, see here and here). On 13 May, the investigative news organisation, DropSite, reported that Israeli troops had shot and killed Mohammed Bardawil, a 12-year-old boy. He was one of only four surviving eyewitnesses of the Israeli military’s execution of 15 paramedics, rescue workers and UN staff in Rafah, Gaza, in March 2025.

DropSite noted:

‘Mohammed had testified that some of the paramedics were shot at point-blank range – “from one meter away.” He was also interviewed by The New York Times for their investigation into the massacre, though his most damning claims were omitted from their final report.’

DropSite added:

‘Mohammed had been scheduled for a second round of testimony with investigators, this time with pediatric psychologists present. Instead, the 12-year-old war crime witness was killed by Israeli forces.’

At the time of writing, it is unclear whether he was specifically targeted in an attack, or caught up in an Israeli raid.

This shocking news has been blanked by the BBC, as far as we can see from searching its website. Indeed, our search of the Nexis newspaper database reveals not a single mention in any UK newspaper.

Imagine if Russia had executed fifteen Red Cross medics, first responders and a UN staff member in Ukraine, burying them in a mass grave along with their vehicles, including an ambulance.

Imagine if Russia had lied about this appalling war crime, as proved by footage recovered from the telephone of one of the executed victims.

Imagine if a 12-year-old Ukrainian witness to this Russian war crime was later shot dead by Russian soldiers. His killing would have been major headline news around the world and serious questions would have been asked.

The Fiction of BBC ‘Transparency’

As mentioned, BBC editors love to proclaim their accountability to the public and transparency of their editorial processes. How, then, would they explain their secrecy in holding private meetings with one of Israel’s former top military officers during Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza?

Declassified UK is a small publicly-funded independent news organisation that runs rings around BBC News, and the rest of the ‘mainstream’ media, on UK foreign policy and the impact of British military and intelligence agencies on human rights and the environment. Declassified UK reported earlier this year that BBC, Guardian and Financial Times editors had secret meetings with Israeli General Aviv Kohavi one month after the Gaza bombardment began.

In attendance were Katherine Viner, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Richard Burgess, director of news content at the BBC, and Roula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times. According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Kohavi’s itinerary also included meetings with Sky News chairman David Rhodes at the Israeli embassy, and then shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, between 7 and 9 November 2023.

Kohavi had only stepped down from running Israel’s military months earlier. According to Declassified UK’s investigation, Kohavi had subsequently been ‘tasked with cultivating support for Israel as it escalated its brutal military offensive in Gaza.’

A journalist who was working for the BBC at the time of the visit told Declassified UK:

‘I don’t recall any internal correspondence about the meeting, which the BBC would ordinarily send out if there was a high-profile visit of this kind. I also find it very difficult to believe that the organisation would hold an equivalent meeting with the Hamas government.’

The journalist, who requested anonymity, added:

‘Not only is Kohavi’s visit unprecedented but it’s also outrageous that one of the most senior editors at the BBC should court company with a foreign military figure in this way, especially one whose country stands accused of serious human rights violations.

‘It further undermines the independence and impartiality that the BBC claims to uphold, and I think it has done irreparable damage to any trust audiences had in the corporation.’

Des Freedman, a professor of media at Goldsmiths, University of London, told Declassified UK he could find no mention of General Kohavi in any BBC, Guardian or FT coverage since 2023, when searching on the Nexis database.

He added:

‘Obviously off the record briefings have a place in journalism. However, meeting secretly with a senior IDF representative in the middle of a genocidal campaign as part of an organised propaganda offensive raises serious questions about integrity and transparency.

‘You would hope that news titles would go out of their way to avoid accusations of bias by rejecting the offer to meet privately and instead to put such meetings on the record. In reality, editors at the Guardian, BBC and FT appear willing to open their doors to Israeli spokespeople – no matter how controversial and offensive – in a way which is denied to Palestinian representatives.’

Conclusion: ‘Palestine Is The Rock’

The function of the major news media, very much including BBC News, is not to fully inform or educate the public about what our governments or other elite forces in society are doing. Their primary role is to maintain structures of state and corporate control that keep the public away from the levers of power.

Jason Hickel, a professor of anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, made these cogent observations recently via X:

‘Palestine is the rock on which the West will break itself.

‘Put yourself in the shoes of people in the global South. For nearly two years they have watched how Western leaders, who love to talk about human rights and the rule of law, are happy to shred all these values in the most spectacular displays of hypocrisy in order to prop up their military proxy-state as it openly conducts genocide and ethnic cleansing against an occupied people, even in the face of *overwhelming* international condemnation.’

He continued:

‘What do you think people in the South are supposed to conclude from this?  What would *you* conclude from this in their position?  Decades of Western propaganda have been shattered, this time in full technicolour. Western governments have made it clear that they do not care about human rights and the rule of law when it comes to people of colour, the global majority.’

In fact, Western governments do not even care about human rights and the rule of law in their own countries, where these conflict with the requirements of power and control by elites. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out over many decades, ‘there is a very elaborate propaganda system’ in capitalist societies:

‘involving everything, from the public relations industry and advertising to the corporate media, which simply marginalizes a large part of the population. They technically are allowed to participate by pushing buttons every few years, but they have essentially no role in formulating policy. They can ratify decisions made by others.’

(Noam Chomsky and James Kelman, Between Thought and Expression Lies a Lifetime: Why Ideas Matter, PM Press, 2021, p. 159)

BBC News is a crucial component of this elaborate propaganda system. No amount of self-serving managerial rhetoric about ‘trust’, ‘transparency’ and ‘impartiality’ can refute that fundamental reality.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

The city's Bureau of Education estimates, based on August 2023 population data from the Census and Statistics Department, that the number of 6-year-olds will fall by 31% from 49,600 in 2024 to 34,100 in 2030.

Many who have left the city did so citing political repression under a draconian security law, along with what they regard as the brainwashing of children in the form of "patriotic" and "national security" classes that are now mandatory from kindergarten to university, as the government encourages people to inform on each other.

Birth rates in Hong Kong began declining in 2014, but plummeted sharply in the wake of a 2019 pro-democracy protest movement and subsequent political crackdown, reaching their lowest level since 1960. 

While the population showed a slight uptick following the scrapping of COVID-19 travel curbs, birth rates in the city haven't caught up, with the number of newborns falling by 38% between 2019 and 2022, according to government data.

Lawmakers called on Secretary for Education Christine Choi on July 5 to do something to reverse the trend and stave off what they termed the "decline" of Hong Kong, media reported.

Choi, who is seeking to promote smaller class sizes as school-age populations fall, said her department would be brokering mergers between schools in a bid to engineer a "soft landing" for the city's education over the next few years.

She said the government was hoping to attract 100,000 migrants to Hong Kong under talent and labor schemes, in a bid to fuel population growth over the next two decades.

By 2046, 50 years after the 1997 handover of the then British colony to Chinese rule, Hong Kong is hoping to attract a net inflow of permanent residents numbering almost 900,000, with just over half a million non-permanent residents.

To that end, the government has been handing out free plane tickets to visitors and offering work visas to attract professionals, many from mainland China, to replace those who have left.

 Net departures of permanent residents from Hong Kong totaled 113,000 for the whole of 2022, prompting calls from media backed by the Communist Party for the government to act to stem the brain drain.

Education blogger Yeung Wing Yu, who runs the @edulancet Instagram account, said Hong Kong's allure for expat families, even those relocating from mainland China, was on the wane.

Meanwhile, school numbers have been hit hard by the wave of emigration. "Primary years five and six are the hardest hit," Yeung said. "Many students have left Hong Kong schools and emigrated overseas."

Those who do come in on talent schemes will likely send their children to high-profile schools with a strong reputation for "patriotic education," while other schools will be left to flounder and eventually close, Yeung said.

"The situation in Hong Kong's education system has been created by the Education Bureau since 2020," Yeung said, in a reference to the passing of Hong Kong's first National Security Law and its imposition of a China-inspired patriotic education program in schools.

Letter from Xi

Last month, the Education Bureau sparked a public backlash when it criticized Hong Kong's schoolchildren for their "weak" singing of China's national anthem, the "March of the Volunteers," at flag-raising ceremonies that are now compulsory as part of patriotic "national security" education from kindergarten through to universities.

"Our education system is no longer very different from the system in mainland China," Yeung said. "Patriotic education here is even more exaggerated than in the mainland."

"If you are caught making faces while singing the national anthem at a football game in Hong Kong, you will be arrested, then it becomes a negative news story about Hong Kong," he said.

Hong Kong passed a law in 2020 making it illegal to insult China's national anthem on pain of prison for up to three years, following a series of incidents in which Hong Kong soccer fans booed their own anthem.

Meanwhile, city officials are holding events to encourage praise for ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.

The Education Bureau on Monday held an event at Pui Kiu Middle School to mark the first anniversary of the school's receipt of a letter from Xi.

"Over the year, the Bureau has been striving to live up to the spirit of President Xi's reply letter and nurture young people's affection for and sense of belonging to the country," Choi told the gathering, promising a wider variety of school trips to mainland China, including exchange programs and study tours.

Secondary school students now take part in military-style activities at a national defense education facility in the southern province of Guangdong and "cultivate patriotism and enhance national security awareness," the Beijing-backed Wen Wei Po newspaper reported in September 2023, citing a circular sent to schools by the Hong Kong Education Bureau.

More than 930 government schools in Hong Kong have been twinned with schools in mainland China, Choi said.

Yeung said the session at the Pui Kiu Middle School resembled the "songs of praise" for late supreme leader Mao Zedong during China's Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, adding that commemorative books were handed out to students.

"Last year, Xi Jinping wrote a letter ... and one year later, Pui Kiu Middle School already has a special status within the Hong Kong education system," he said. "I expect we'll see more pilgrims visiting the school in future."

Yeung said some Hong Kong schools, which mostly teach in the city's lingua franca, Cantonese, will likely need to switch to Mandarin as a medium of instruction to cater to mainland Chinese students.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by RFA staff.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Luk Nam Choi and Ray Chung for RFA Cantonese.

National Security Bureau Director-General Tsai Ming-yen told lawmakers on Thursday that Beijing is taking advantage of Taiwan's free, open and democratic society to step up its efforts to infiltrate the island, undermine its armed forces and sway the political views of its 23 million people.

"The number of cases [we are investigating] has increased significantly compared with previous years," Tsai told the island's Legislative Yuan. "The Chinese Communist Party's infiltration activities are increasingly rampant in Taiwan, posing a severe challenge to national security work."

Taiwan is currently ruled as the Republic of China, a sovereign state formed in 1911 after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, and whose Kuomintang government fled to the island after losing a civil war with Mao Zedong's communists in 1949.

Taiwanese law bans the island's people or organizations from engaging in any form of cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party, the mainland Chinese government or military that could involve political influence or harm its interests, and the majority of people have no wish to submit to Chinese rule.

While Beijing has never ruled out a military invasion to enforce its territorial claim on Taiwan, it has more recently vowed to achieve "peaceful unification" with the island through propaganda and other forms of pressure.

Investigations into spying

Tsai said agents of the Chinese state have stepped up intelligence gathering and espionage, infiltrating organizations, stealing technological secrets and influencing elections in recent months.

He said his bureau has investigated 84 cases of Chinese activities during the past year, 39 of which have led to prosecutions.

Agents and supporters of the Chinese state recruit more like them by putting pressure on people to sign "oaths of allegiance" to Beijing, with the armed forces a particular target for espionage, Tsai said.

Related stories:

Taiwan probes reports of direct Chinese influence at TV station

Chinese agents highly active in democratic Taiwan, dissidents say

China-backed hackers step up spying on Taiwan: security firm

They spy on unofficial credit networks, pawnbrokers and loan sharks to figure out which military personnel are in debt, then use that as leverage for secrets, he said.

"They also recruit retired national security personnel and infiltrate political parties and government departments," Tsai said.

There is also funding for such "United Front" activities, although it typically comes from a broad network of pro-China organizations and individuals rather than directly from China, he said, calling the arrangement a "red supply chain."

China also infiltrates sensitive industries in Taiwan in a bid to steal advanced technology and commercial secrets, Tsai told lawmakers, adding that the island's academics and industry experts are often offered incentives to take their research to China instead.

Michael Chen, Director-General of Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau, also commented in the same session that the U.S.-China trade war and technology war have triggered a restructuring of the global supply chain, which is driving much of the industrial espionage from Beijing.

Xinhua influence?

Tsai's report to lawmakers comes amid an ongoing investigation into a newspaper report that a journalist from China's state news agency Xinhua was closely involved in editing a political talk show at a Taiwanese TV station.

The island's Liberty Times reported on June 24 that officials from China's Taiwan Affairs Office had approached several Taiwanese TV stations since the beginning of this year with proposals to start new political talk shows in exchange for preferential commercial treatment in the Chinese market.

Only one accepted, the paper said, adding that Xinhua journalist Zhao Bo took part in all discussions about the show's content, and showed up at the studio as the first episode was being recorded to ensure all the guests followed the agreed scripts.

Zhao also had private conversations with the guests at which she made clear exactly which angles she wanted emphasized, the report said.

But investigations have been hampered by the lack of a whistleblower, and the fact that Zhao is no longer in Taiwan, officials said on Thursday.

"We currently have no specific evidence, and no whistleblower," National Communications Commission deputy chief Weng Po-tsung told lawmakers.

And Liang Wen-chieh, Deputy Minister of Taiwan's government agency in charge of Chinese affairs, the Mainland Affairs Council, declined to comment when asked by RFA Cantonese why officials had been unable to find anyone to testify in the probe.

"We have asked everyone that we should ask," Liang said cryptically, before declining further comment, saying only lawmakers should be asking such questions.

Lo Chih-chiang, a lawmaker with the pro-China Kuomintang, dismissed the Liberty Times report as "fake news" that had been endorsed by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hsia Hsiao-hwa for RFA Mandarin, Ray Chung for RFA Cantonese.

In his very last article, ‘We are Spartacus’, published just a month before his death in December, John Pilger included a quote that exactly captured the truth of our time:

‘“This is a sharp time, now, a precise time …” wrote Arthur Miller in The Crucible, “We live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.”’

No-one saw more clearly than Pilger that the West’s use of ultra-violence to impose its brutal, zero-sum version of ‘international order’ is now completely out in the open. Even the blurred obfuscations of the state-corporate media lens are no longer able to hide the reality of who ‘we’ are.

Consider US Senator Lindsey Graham last month. With tens of thousands of civilians dead in Gaza, Graham dug down to some dark place and said on NBC:

‘Can I say this? Why is it OK for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war? Why was it OK for us to do that? I thought it was OK.’

Graham was mistaken; it wasn’t ‘OK’ at all. But anyway, his point:

‘So, Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state. Whatever you have to do.’ (Original emphasis)

The implication was clear. Past and future massacres of civilians – notably of women and children – were declared, not just ‘OK’, but unavoidable:

‘I think it’s impossible to mitigate civilian deaths in Gaza as long as Hamas uses their own population as human shields. I’ve never seen in the history of warfare such blatant efforts by an enemy – Hamas – to put civilians at risk.’

Graham concluded:

‘The last thing you want to do is reward this behavior.’

Israel reining in its US-supplied firepower to kill fewer civilians would be a ‘reward’ for bad behaviour.

Perhaps you remember Western politicians expressing such unapologetic savagery in the face of genocidal killing. We do not.

And Graham is not alone. Also in May, US Congressman Brian Mast called on Israel to devastate Rafah, where 600,000 children were then sheltering from Israeli bombs:

‘I think Israel should go in there and kick the shit out of them, just absolutely destroy them, their infrastructure, level anything that they touch.’

Three weeks later, on 27 May, media reported that at least eight Israeli missiles had slammed into Rafah’s camp of plastic tents. Refugees, mostly women and children, were burned alive. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting described the carnage many of us saw for ourselves on social media:

‘A boy cries in horror and fear as he watches his father’s tent burn with him inside. A man holds up the body of his charred, now-headless baby, wandering around, not knowing what to do or where to go. An injured, starving child convulses in pain as a medic struggles to find a vein for an IV in her emaciated arm.’

Worse was to come on 8 June when Israeli forces launched a raid to rescue four hostages from the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. At least 274 Palestinians were killed with 698 wounded. The EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell described the assault as a ‘massacre’, while the UN’s aid chief Martin Griffiths spoke of ‘shredded bodies on the ground’. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, posted on X:

‘The #Nuseirat massacre will go down in history as one of the most appalling examples of disdain for Palestinian life in one of the most well-documented and boasted about genocides in history.’

The BBC headline reporting this massacre read merely:

‘Four hostages rescued in Gaza as hospitals say scores killed in Israeli strikes’

It was not at all surprising that the BBC mentioned the four hostages rescued ahead of the ‘scores’ – in fact, nearly 300 – Palestinians killed. News of the 274 Palestinian victims quickly dropped down the news page. Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook commented:

‘BBC News’ main report on Saturday night breathlessly focused on the celebrations of the families of the freed captives, treating the massacre of Palestinians as an afterthought.’

Compare the BBC’s headline with one supplied by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights:

‘UN experts condemn outrageous disregard for Palestinian civilians during Israel’s military operation in Nuseirat’

Conditioned as we are by the ‘mainstream’ habit of normalising the unthinkable, we might not find the BBC headline all that biased – they just reported the facts. But just imagine if the identities of the civilians killed and the hostages rescued were reversed. While the deaths of 274 Israelis would have been a seismic event for the BBC for days and weeks, the liberation of four Palestinian hostages would hardly have been mentioned and certainly not celebrated. Journalists would have dreaded giving the impression that the release of four Palestinian hostages in any way justified the killing of so many Israelis. This New York Times headline would be unthinkable:

‘Hostages Reunited with Family After Israel Military Operation

‘Scores of Palestinians were killed, hospital officials said, as Israel carried out an intense military campaign to free four hostages’

Likewise, this Washington Post headline:

‘Four Israeli hostages rescued alive; at least

‘210 people killed in Gaza, officials say’

Is it not clear how the value of one group of human beings is relentlessly raised above the other? The Washington Post even commented:

‘For Israel, a rare day of joy amid bloodshed as 4 hostages rescued alive.’

If the identities were reversed, the idea that a day on which 274 Israelis had been killed might be declared ‘a rare day of joy’ would be deemed unthinkable, obscene.

Despite the many hundreds of dead and wounded civilians, and so many massacres of civilians over so many months, headlines in The Sunday Times described the massacre as a ‘daring raid’, a ‘surgical strike’ that resulted in ‘celebrations’.

Although the Nuseirat massacre clearly trashed President Biden’s supposed ‘red lines’, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan also described the attack as a ‘daring operation’. The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called it an ‘important sign of hope’. With hundreds of ‘shredded bodies on the ground’, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed his ‘huge relief’.

How Many Gazans ‘Support Their Murdering, Raping Masters’?

For seven months, all political writers using social media have been relentlessly assailed by footage of tiny Palestinian children (often orphans) burned, bleeding, crushed, shaking in pain and terror, bits of broken skull protruding from their heads. We know we are living ‘in a sharp time’ when the Telegraph’s Associate Editor Camilla Tominey can respond to all of this on 18 May with a piece titled:

‘Admitting Gazan refugees would be proof that Britain has a death wish

‘We have no idea how many Palestinians support their murdering, raping masters’

Tominey wrote with utmost brutality:

‘We took in Ukrainians in part because we have a security agreement with Ukraine and can be fairly certain that none of those fleeing the Russian invasion are terrorists.

‘Sadly the same cannot be said for occupants of a country run by Hamas. Regardless of their medical – or other – qualifications, we have no idea how many Gazans support their murdering, raping masters, or how many have been further radicalised by war.

‘It would surely be better if these Labour MPs focused on our own problems, without burdening Britain yet further with someone else’s.’

Britain should not assume the ‘burden’ of helping injured babies and tiny, traumatised infants, when we have no way of knowing how many might ‘support their murdering, raping masters’.

Regarding rape, The Times discussed (7 June) a United Nations report submitted earlier this year by Pramilla Patten, the UN secretary-general’s special representative on sexual violence during and since the Hamas attacks of 7 October:

‘Patten made it clear there was sufficient evidence of acts of sexual violence to merit full and proper investigation and expressed her shock at the brutality of the violence. The report also confirmed Israeli authorities were unable to provide much of the evidence that political leaders had insisted existed. In all the Hamas video footage Patten’s team had watched and all the photographs they had seen, there were no depictions of rape. We hired a leading Israeli dark-web researcher to look for evidence of those images, including footage deleted from public sources. None could be found.

‘The report would prove confusing to the Israeli political establishment. On the one hand, it gives substantial and substantiated credence to the sexual assault claims; on the other it does not show them to be systematic and specifically says Israel has been unable to produce evidence it has claimed to possess of Hamas’s written orders to rape. Patten also asked that Israel investigate “credible allegations” of rape and sexual violence against Palestinian women and girls gathered by the UN’s legal mandate mission in the Palestinian territories.’

The Times also cited Orit Sulitzeanu, the executive director of Israel’s Association of Rape Crisis Centres:

‘The first letter that I received from the government of Israel talked about hundreds or thousands of cases of brutal sexual violence perpetrated against men, women and children. I have not found anything like that.’

Tominey smeared the entire Palestinian population with this comment:

‘It is also worth noting that a Palestinian student has already had her visa revoked after saying she was “full of joy” after the October 7 attacks. Dana Abuqamar, 19, a law student at the University of Manchester, said that she was “proud that Palestinian resistance has come to this point” after the atrocities. It would be naive to believe that the average Palestinian wishing to come to the UK thinks much differently.’

Tominey linked to an earlier Telegraph article by Isabel Oakeshott from October 2023, which sympathised with the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, but added:

‘To usher in an additional cohort of traumatised people, many, if not most, of whom will not share our values; will not speak our language; and will not find it easy to build new lives here, would be insane. With the right support, most would probably integrate – but we must face up to the uncomfortable truth that a very small number will not wish us well, and may repay our generosity by fomenting division and hatred in our communities – or worse.’

Oakeshott offered the warning of protesters who ‘appear convinced that the plight of the people of Gaza is the fault of the Israelis, as opposed to the cruel Iranian-sponsored militia that controls the territory’. This, she said, ‘has grave implications for community cohesion. How much more dangerous will this already febrile situation become, if we naively import thousands more people brutalised by war and confused about who is to blame for their plight?’

Oakeshott’s brutal sign-off: ‘the UK does not have a duty to take a single one of those escaping the fall-out’. (Our emphasis)

Media brutality feeds party political brutality, which feeds further media brutality… and down we go. Peter Oborne, former chief political commentator of The Daily Telegraph, commented recently:

‘One of the historical roles of the Conservative Party has been to act as a prophylactic against fascist and far-right forces which, history shows us, have always lurked not far under the surface in British society.

‘It is no longer playing that role. The Conservative Party is falling into the hands of the far right before our eyes.’

In his conclusion to a separate piece, Oborne posts an ominous warning on the emerging political culture of this ‘sharp time’:

‘For the first time in my life it is possible to look forward and envisage a sequence of events that might turn Britain fascist.’ (‘Peter Oborne’s Diary – The Dark Shadow of Fascism,’ Byline Times, July 2024)

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

Photograph Source: Djm-leighpark – CC BY-SA 4.0

Last week, a Bahamian friend living in Nassau was telling me he was getting cracked conch on Kemp Street, a Bahamian version of UK fish and chips. I was sorry not to be there. Instead, I was a guest of the NHS, our precious National Health Service. Our publicly funded healthcare system accessible to those living in the UK, no matter their citizenship, and begun after WWII when healthcare even more important than ever.

In the Accident & Emergency (A&E) department of my local South East London hospital, 64 people were presently lined up on plastic chairs. They were like characters in a Beatles song. We were all together watching a plain wide screen declaring 9 hours and 21 minutes of waiting time.

There was faltering public confidence naturally in the NHS in the wake of these types of delay, unaided by fresh difficulties in accessing GP surgeries. The latest rating from CQC (Care Quality Commission) was that this hospital ‘requires improvement’, though for some in the room the process had already begun, and they were sat back down again. As the day progressed, however, the room would almost burst with patients — free healthcare does not a sick-free nation make — and most of the medical staff would be exhausted.

I shifted in my chair. ‘Wherever the art of medicine is loved,’ said Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, ‘there is also a love of humanity.’ The man next to me sat slumped in a wheelchair while his daughter dabbed the corner of his mouth. An elderly woman with a bloody lip in the row in front was perched next to an over-anxious husband in a wheelchair, while their two sons told everyone they dropped everything to get there.

Coughs. Sputum. A lot of that. Groans. Jugs of water and paper cups sitting on a nearby table.

At which point, a male in his late teens, barking loudly at a similarly aged female, limped into the building, loosely accusing his friend with whatever wreckage fell from his mouth. The female about-turned, both voices trailing behind them as they happened again in the big bad world.

Still feeling gratitude for the care being given, I was forgetting that NHS staff need more than our gratitude. Proper pay, as one would tell me later, and better resources — these were the orders of the day. It was all very well thinking we all need each other. The NHS was a never-ending funding crisis. There were staff shortages, impossibly high demand, weakening testing and preventative care. Not to mention well-documented profiteers still running amok down the hospital corridors.

Even Conservative Party donor Frank Hester — who said Labour MP Diane Abbott made him ‘want to hate all black women’ and that she ‘should be shot’ — has received more than £400m in swift and hugely profitable private contracts from the NHS and other government bodies.

Which is not to say hospitals don’t offer insight into the human condition. Hippocrates also said healing was a matter of time but also a matter of opportunity.

A man to my left slumped forward like a broken doll. At first sight, he looked like Laurence Olivier’s Archie Rice in Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer. He wore a loud checked suit, incongruous tie, and tiger-patterned shoes, which curled up at the end. He was trembling hard. Not a tall man, his legs while seated didn’t reach the ground. Popping one eye open when his name — a Slavic name — was called, he placed both on the ground, and marched towards the awaiting nurse, herself doing an impromptu head-count — like Nurse Ratched in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. All that was missing was the music of Jack Nitzsche.

I was still suffering from acute renal failure due to a suspected kidney stone. No big deal if I avoided organ failure, and it did allow me privileged access to the state-of-play in the NHS today as I awaited results from blood tests and a CT scan.

My assigned doctor beckoned me forward. I had noticed his gloomy disposition earlier, ascribable to a heavy workload, but he seemed lighter now and confirmed that I had a very large stone requiring a temporary stent in the kidney.

I was moved to an area with six large padded blue chairs, confusingly numbered ‘Red Chair 1’, ‘Red Chair 2’, etc. The man opposite, who was grimacing heavily, betrayed a natural friendliness. ‘I am 86,’ he chipped in, though he looked impressively younger. ‘Just been diagnosed with terminal cancer,’ he added, like a man describing a simple walk.

I said I was terribly sorry. He didn’t seem to hear, shouting instead that his wife had SAD: ‘Seasonally Affective Disorder,’ he strained. ‘Just starting to get better, too.’ He nodded and smiled. Insisting upon standing the whole time, he swayed about momentarily on his hips, just like a character in a Patrick O’Brian sea novel. To me, this man was heroic.

Next to him sat the man in the loud checked suit, still trembling. We had been placed on intravenous drips. Out of nowhere, a third man announced he had leukaemia. ‘He must be cold,’ he said, interrupting himself and pointing to the man in the suit. ‘Can’t we help?’ he asked. I placed my great coat across him and called for a nurse.

Just then, the SAD wife’s husband declared he could no longer hear because the battery in his hearing aid had run out. At which point, leukaemia man said he took something to help relieve himself, which was why in no time he was grabbing a paper cup and stuffing it down his trousers, the expression on his face one of imperious relief.

Next, a Rastafarian with a soundbox and walking stick wandered through, playing soft reggae and wishing everyone well. ‘Hopin’ y’all iris,’ he kept saying. ‘’Iris’?’ asked leukaemia man. ‘Feelin’ good,’ explained the Rasta, grinning at his bright red operating socks.

Then a youngish couple arrived, the woman in obvious pain. The man was being aggressive to one of the doctors, a young Muslim woman with a headscarf, accusing her of being rude, an accusation she politely declined.

His partner gasped and rolled. I wondered if she had a kidney stone. This was when more medical colleagues arrived, the man by now accusing them ALL of rudeness — who cares for beauty if your manners are ugly, I was thinking.

‘I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one,’ said NHS founder Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevin — presently played by Michael Sheen in ‘Nye’ at London’s Olivier Theatre — but this one antagonistic man seemed more in need of an ashram in Poona than even warm altruism.

Half an hour later, a needle was stabbed into my stomach, appropriately enough while looking at photographs of whale intestines taken by Jeffrey St Clair with his niece on a faraway beach in Oregon.

A call to prayer emitted from the hospital tannoy — Ramadan was due any moment — and I was wheeled to the ward as if on a camera dolly. Behind my bed’s drawn curtains, I could hear a nearby couple whispering.

I was introduced to the anaesthetist, an elegant woman with a worldly vibe, then to my surgeon, a warm and confident Bahamian with political aspirations. He was soon outlining the specifics of the insertion of the stent. This would be done under general anaesthetic via what I once remembered Italians calling the pepperoncino.

Sure enough, I soon lay beneath bright white lights in an anaesthetic room as Calumn, Ola and Sammy — I read their name-tags — put me to sleep. ‘Here’s what we like to call a nice little gin and tonic for you,’ said Calumn, administering the drugs.

I fell down a giant manhole, lights flashing as I dropped and dropped, arms gently flailing, music playing, sound effects, the surface by now so far away.

All life had become illusion. Jorge Luis Borges sat in a giant armchair stroking a tiny bird. The subconscious had left long ago. Welcome to the sub-subconscious.

Then I heard what sounded like wind chimes, animal sounds, an imagined bluebottle on a summer’s day.

At last, I was coming round. I was in a strange place. I was in the recovery room.

After being returned to my ward, I lay beneath my sheets as an unseen man in a neighbouring bed spoke in Urdu. I peered down at my catheter from where blood was flowing heavily into a bag. I called out for the nurse who took one look at it and ran for help, before returning more calmly to say I should drink more water, which I did. I began to feel better, the blood in the catheter clearing.

The catheter was removed the next day, after which the surgeon discharged me, saying he would remove the stent and work out what to do with the stone a few weeks later. ‘You can sail and play golf,’ he smiled.

I have long admired American poet Gary Snyder: ‘Doom scenarios, even though they might be true, are not politically or psychologically effective. The first step… is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world,’ he wrote. Placing the very real problems of the NHS aside for one moment, acknowledging the seriously injured patients trapped inside Gaza’s hospitals, remembering dying victims of war in Sudan’s growing refugee camps, acknowledging brutish casualties on Ukraine’s frontlines, I have to say I was already looking forward to hearing more from my surgeon about Bahamian politics. Perhaps we can all be getting cracked conch on Kemp Street.

The post Letter from London: The Sharp Compassion of the Healer’s Art appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bach.

Fiji’s military commander stirred a wave of anxiety today with an extraordinary statement claiming concern over the “ambition and speed” of political changes since last month’s election that could have “fateful” security consequences.

Major-General Ro Jone Kalouniwai, commander-in-chief of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF), said in the statement that the military played a “guardian role” under the Constitution and “new assaults” on Fiji’s democracy would “not be tolerated”.

But he was summoned by Home Affairs Minister Pio Tikoduadua for a meeting this afternoon and Major-General Kalouniwai denied to news media that the military planned any takeover.

• READ MORE: Fiji’s government summons top military commander
• Other Fiji politics reports

Fiji has had four coups in less than four decades, carried out by either the military or rogue soldiers.

Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka staged the first two coups in 1987, but he was the elected prime minister 1992-99, while businessman George Speight supported by rogue troops carried out the third in 2000, and then military commander Voreqe Bainimarama seized power in 2006 with a “coup to end all coups”.

Bainimarama has held power for the past 16 years, half of them as the elected leader, but narrowly lost his FijiFirst party majority in last month’s election.

All four coups have been marked by allegations of ethnic tension between indigenous iTaukei Fijians and Indo-Fijians.

RFMF ‘backs democracy’
However, in an exclusive interview this afternoon with Fijivillage News, Major-General Kalouniwai stressed that the RFMF would continue to stand for democracy, the rule of law and honour, and the government.

Home Affairs Minister Tikoduadua said after their meeting he had reassured the commander that all the actions of the new People’s Alliance-led coalition government had been guided by the law.

The minister also claimed that the commander’s statement had been “sensationalised” by media and he was concerned that state-run FBC News was “inciting and misrepresenting” what Major-General Kalouniwai had said.

Tikoduadua said the news had been “corrected” by the commander.

Major-General Kalouniwai’s statement and reaction have been widely carried by news media in Fiji.

According to The Fiji Times, Major-General Kalouniwai had raised concern in his statement over some of the rapid changes the government had undertaken in “just 16 days in office”.

He said that section 131 of the Constitution stipulated “the RFMF plays a guardian role where the excesses of the past are not repeated and any new assaults on Fiji’s emerging democracy are not tolerated”.

‘Creating shortcuts’
Major-General Kalouniwai said: “The RFMF has quietly observed with growing concern over the last few days, the ambition and speed of the government in implementing these sweeping changes are creating shortcuts that circumvent the relevant processes and procedures that protect the integrity of the law and the Constitution.

“Whilst the RFMF recognises the justifications by the current government to establish these changes, the RFMF believes that trying and failing to democratise in adverse circumstances has the potential to bring about fateful, long-term national security consequences.

“The RFMF is concerned whether these rapid changes are being pursued without a full understanding of the process and procedures or intentionally done to challenge the integrity of the law and the Constitution of this land.”

Major-General Kalouniwai said the RFMF firmly believed the separation of powers between the executive and the judicial arms of the state must be respected, reports The Fiji Times.

“It must be important to understand and appreciate that a strong rule of law is built on respect for and adherence to a clear separation of powers between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary.

“Whatever the reasons may be, the RFMF feels that such actions and decisions is putting at risk the very nature of the law and the separation of powers that clearly demarcate the independence of the three arms of government.”

Major-General Kalouniwai said section 131 of the Constitution also ensured the values and principles of democracy, including the checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution, were not undermined.

‘No takeover plan’
FBC News reports that Major-General Kalouniwai said he did “not plan to take over the government”.

The commander said he would not make any further comments about his earlier statement and Minister Tikoduadua would brief Fijians about their meeting this afternoon.

Major-General Kalouniwai told Fijivillage News that RFMF had spoken in defence of democracy and the rule of law before, during and after the 2022 general elections.

The commander said that today’s statement focused on ensuring that the government followed proper procedures and processes when making changes.

He said the “rule of law must be paramount”.

Home Affairs Minister Pio Tikoduadua, who is also Minister of Defence, said he had assured Major-General Kalouniwai that all the government’s actions had been guided by the law, reports Fijivillage News.

He added that he had had a “cordial meeting” with the commander, who had reassured him that he would no longer be making any public statement such as the one earlier today.

Tikoduadua said he had discussed two main issues with the commander — concerns over the government plan for sacked Fiji Airways and Air Terminal Services staff to be rehired, and over the future of Fiji diplomats abroad.

In May 2020, 758 Fiji Airways and 258 ATS staff lost their jobs due to covid-19.

Tikoduadua said the major-general had pledged support for the government.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The post Warning: Sharp Curve Ahead appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard C. Gross.

The first, and more obvious conclusion, is that Britain has a completely dysfunctional political and media system that has allowed two mediocre, clueless careerists like Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng to reach the pinnacle of the power pyramid – and then car-crash the economy because they refused to listen to economic advisers whose sole job was to stop them sabotaging a system carefully calibrated to maintain a transatlantic Ponzi scheme designed to enrich a wealth elite while trashing the planet.

As Noam Chomsky has observed often enough in the wider context of western democracies, the British establishment has – or at least used to have – a very efficient filtering system in place to weed out not only those ideologically unsuited to supporting the hierarchical structure of privilege it had carefully constructed but also those lacking the temperament or intellectual heft to do so. The system was designed to block anyone from reaching a position of significant influence unless they could dependably contribute to keeping the system in good order for the elite.

The signs are that, as late-stage capitalism runs into the cold realities of a physical world with which it is in conflict and from which it seeks to distract us – with aggressive identity politics, the “It’s all about me” culture, and social networking – the effectiveness of these filters is breaking down, for good and bad. That is why dangerous narcissists like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are increasingly floating to the top. It’s also why authentic, moderate socialists such as Jeremy Corbyn and the rail union’s Mick Lynch, as well as Bernie Sanders in the United States, have gained more of a purchase than the establishment ever intended.

Truss’ elevation to prime minister, immediately in the wake of Johnson’s festival of cronyism and corruption, demonstrates that these filters no longer function. The system is breaking down ideologically just as surely as the infrastructure of supply chains and gas pipelines is breaking down materially. We are in store for a rocky ride at the hands of serial blunderers and con(wo)men over the coming years.

Sweet lord. The PM is literally lost for words on BBC Stoke when questioned about mortgages. pic.twitter.com/BGCv0RfMBR

— Dino Sofos (@dinosofos) September 29, 2022

Hive mind

The second lesson is in many ways the flipside of the first.

Truss may have triggered the economic crisis through a toxic mix of ego, incompetence and ideological fervour, but we should be extremely wary of focusing exclusively on blaming her. She didn’t do the equivalent of jumping off a cliff on the assumption that she could defy gravity: the crisis was not caused because she violated some fundamental, scientific law of economics. The current crisis is manmade. She is being punished for doing things “the market” – meaning people who control our money – do not like.

Those functionaries of capitalism don’t sit around plotting how they will react to a budget like Kwarteng’s. They responded in unison much as a big shoal of fish suddenly and collectively take a new course. They operate as a hive mind. In this case, they were driven by shared economic assumptions, which in turn are based on a dominant economic ideology, which in turn is based on a consensual political worldview – one that largely ignores social justice or environmental realities, as the growing polarisation in wealth and the climate crisis indicate only too clearly.

“The market” believes Truss is in danger of wrecking the system that upholds their privilege – by accruing too much debt while also starving the government of income by cutting taxation too much. Because economics is not a science but a kind of elite formation psychosis, the instinctual reaction of “the market” to Kwarteng’s budget was to … wreck Britain’s economy. The Bank of England stepped in not to change the fundamentals of the economy but to “reassure the market”. You don’t need to reassure a law of nature.

Economic ‘laws’

Truss’ recklessness and ideological fervour have got “the market” jittery – and with good cause. But it would behave in an almost identical fashion against anyone who broke what it considers as the “laws” – termed “sound money” this week by Truss’ supposed political rival, Sir Keir Starmer – underpinning a globalised capitalist economy.

Witness the current pile-on against Truss, with the City crushing her, forcing her to bend to its will. Can anyone doubt that had Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader who came within a hair’s breadth of winning the 2017 election, actually made it into Downing Street, he would have been treated at least as harshly as Truss is being dealt with now? His radical programme of spending and investment was a much bigger threat to “the market” than Truss’s confounded efforts to win favour with big business and voters at the same time.

Corbyn’s programme would have been greeted with hostility not because it exuded incompetence, as Truss’s does, but because the City would have refused to stomach his plans to meaningfully redistribute wealth and make British society fairer. He would have been made to bend to the will of “the market” even more ferociously than Truss is being now.

The establishment who maligned Corbyn as a traitor, and a spy, and an antisemite, did so not because these things were true but because the former Labour leader was a threat to their wealth and privilege. The devastating war they waged on his political programme was simply a foretaste of the war they were all too ready to wage on his economic programme.

My latest: Corbyn's election to lead the Labour party didn't overturn the rigged political system or end the corporate chokehold on power. His victory was an accident, and the system has been fighting back with all its might to correct the error ever since https://t.co/2u0Vyo0qLU

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 3, 2019

Starmer, Corbyn’s successor, understands this only too well. Which is a major reason why he is so timid, so feeble, why he hews so closely to the wishes of the self-proclaimed “masters of the universe”.

The economic game is even more rigged than the political game. When the banks and hedge funds nearly brought their giant Ponzi scheme crashing down in 2008, they were decreed by western governments as “too big to fail”. Taxpayers bailed them out twice over: first, through years of austerity, through savage belt-tightening, to pay off the elite’s debts; and then, by being required to fund the rebuilding of the casino so that the elite could fleece the public all over again.

Truss may be a lightweight. But the mauling she is receiving right now ought to sharply remind us of the limits faced by any politician who wishes to change a system that was designed to protect itself ruthlessly from change.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

The post Sharp Transformations appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joseph Natoli.