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When The Invasion Began, The British Public Was Called Upon To 'support' Troops Sent Illegally And Undemocratically To Kill People With Whom We Had No Quarrel. 'the Ultimate Test Of Our Professionalism' Is How Commander Mckendrick Describes An Unprovoked Attack On A Nation With No Submarines, No Navy And No Air Force, And Now With No Clean Water And No Electricity And, In Many Hospitals, No Anaesthetic With Which To Amputate Small Limbs Shredded By Shrapnel. I Have Seen Elsewhere How This Is Done, With A Gag In The Patient's Mouth.

-John Pilger

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When The Invasion Began,

John Pilger

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When The Invasion Began, The British Public Was Called Upon To 'support' Troops Sent Illegally And Undemocratically To Kill People With Whom We Had No Quarrel. 'the Ultimate Test Of Our Professionalism' Is How Commander Mckendrick Describes An Unprovoked Attack On A Nation With No Submarines, No Navy And No Air Force, And Now With No Clean Water And No Electricity And, In Many Hospitals, No Anaesthetic With Which To Amputate Small Limbs Shredded By Shrapnel. I Have Seen Elsewhere How This Is Done, With A Gag In The Patient's Mouth.

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The People Who Died In The Twin Towers In That Terrible Crime Mattered. The People Who Were Bombed To Death In Dusty Villages In Afghanistan Didn't Matter, Even Though It Now Seems That Their Numbers Were Greater. The People Who Will Die In Iraq Don't Matter.

British Establishment Uses "the Royal We," As In, "we Think This." You Hear A Lot Of That These Days. It Erroneously Suggests That Those Who Are Making The Decisions To Bomb Countries, To Devastate Economies, To Take Part In Acts Of International Piracy Involve All Of Us.

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In Western Australia, Minerals Are Being Dug Up From Aboriginal Land And Shipped To China For A Profit Of A Billion Dollars A Week. In This, The Richest, 'booming' State, The Prisons Bulge With Stricken Aboriginal People, Including Juveniles Whose Mothers Stand At The Prison Gates, Pleading For Their Release. The Incarceration Of Black Australians Here Is Eight Times That Of Black South Africans During The Last Decade Of Apartheid.

When The Invasion Began, The British Public Was Called Upon To 'support' Troops Sent Illegally And Undemocratically To Kill People With Whom We Had No Quarrel. 'the Ultimate Test Of Our Professionalism' Is How Commander Mckendrick Describes An Unprovoked Attack On A Nation With No Submarines, No Navy And No Air Force, And Now With No Clean Water And No Electricity And, In Many Hospitals, No Anaesthetic With Which To Amputate Small Limbs Shredded By Shrapnel. I Have Seen Elsewhere How This Is Done, With A Gag In The Patient's Mouth.

Journalists Don't Sit Down And Think, "i'm Now Going To Speak For The Establishment." Of Course Not. But They Internalize A Whole Set Of Assumptions, And One Of The Most Potent Assumptions Is That The World Should Be Seen In Terms Of Its Usefulness To The West, Not Humanity. This Leads Journalists To Make A Distinction Between People Who Matter And People Who Don't Matter.

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An Elite Group Of Less Than A Billion People Now Take More Than 80 Per Cent Of The World's Wealth.

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Certainly, Until There Is Justice For The Palestinians, There Will Never Be Any Kind Of Stability In The Middle East.

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