I LOVE Beirut :)

All what has happened in our beloved country 'Lebanon' and all what is happening in the Middle East has reminded me of John Pilger's amazing novel 'The New Rulers of the World'. He is one of the world's most renowed journalists and documentary film-makers. He reveals the secrets and illusions of modern imperialism. Beginning with Indonesia, he shows how General Suharto's bloody seizure of power in the 1960s was part of a western design to impose a 'global economy' on Asia. In a shocking chapter on Iraq, he allows us to understand the true nature of the West's war against the people of that country. And he dissects, piece by piece, the propaganda of the 'war on terror' to expose its Orwellian truth.

He is a great journalist with utmost consciencioustness, bravery and courage. Please read a selection of his work...which might help us in understanding the underlying reasons behind the war...

'When American Vice-President Dick Cheney said that the 'war on terrorism' could last for fifty years or more, his works evoked George Orwell's great prophetic work, Nineteen Eighty Four. We are to live with the great threat and illusion of endless war, it seems, in order to justify increased social control and state repression, while great power pusues its goal of global supremacy.
In the novel, three slogans dominate society: war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Today's slogan, 'war on terrorism', also reverses meaning. The war is terrorism. The most potent weapon in this war is pseudo-information, different only in form from that Orwell described, consigning to oblivion unacceptable truths and historical sense. Dissent is permissible within 'consensual' boundaries, reinforcing the illusion that information and speech are 'free'.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 did not 'change everything', but accelerated the continuity of events, providing an extraordinary pretext for destroying social demcracy. The undermining of the Bill of Rights in the United States and the further dismantling of trial by jury in Britain and a plethors of related civil liberties are part of the reduction between indistinguishable parties for the management of a single-ideology state.
The 'global economy' is their most important media enterprise. 'Global Economy' is a modern Orwellian term. On the surface, it is instant financial trading, mobile phones, McDonald's, Starbucks, holidays booked on the net. Beneath this gloss, it is the globalization of poverty, a world where most human beings never make a phone call and live with less than two dollars a day, where 6,000 children die every day from diarrhoea because most have no access to clean water.

In this world, unsen by most of us in the global north, a sophisticated system of plunder has forced more than ninety countries into 'structural adjustment' programs since the eighties, widening the divide between risch and poor as never before. This is known as 'nation building' and 'good governance' by the 'quad' dominating the World Trade Organization (the United States, Europe, Canada and Japan) and the Washington triumvirate (the WorldBank, the IMF and the US treasury) but controls even minute aspects of government policy in developing countries. Their power derives largely from an unrepayable debt that forces the poorest countries to pay $100 million to western creditors every day. The result is a world where an elite of fewer than a bilion peole controls 80 percent of humanity's wealth.

Promoting this are the transnational media corporations, American and European, that own or manage the world's principal sources of news and information. They have transformed much of the 'information society' into a media age where exraordinary technology allows the incessant repition of 'politically' safe information that is acceptable to the 'nation builders'. In the West, we are trained to view other societies in terms of their usefulness or threat to 'us' and to regard 'cultural differences' as more important than the political and economic forces by which we judge ourselves. Those with unprecedented resources to understand this, including many who teach and research in the great universities, suppress their knowledge publicly; perhaps never before has there been such a silence.'