With
the Brexit repudiation of the E.U. — in defiance of Establishment
scare tactics — British voters stood up for common people who face
marginalization in the neoliberal scheme of global economics,
explains John Pilger.
by John
Pilger
The majority
vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw
democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied,
intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed
betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking
oligarchy and the media.
This was, in
great part, a vote by those angered and demoralized by the sheer
arrogance of the apologists for the “remain” campaign and the
dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last
bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service,
has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is
fighting for its life.
A
forewarning came when the Treasurer, George Osborne, the embodiment
of both Britain’s ancient regime and the banking mafia in Europe,
threatened to cut £30 billion from public services if people voted
the wrong way; it was blackmail on a shocking scale.
Immigration
was exploited in the campaign with consummate cynicism, not only by
populist politicians from the lunar right, but by Labour politicians
drawing on their own venerable tradition of promoting and nurturing
racism, a symptom of corruption not at the bottom but at the top.
The reason
millions of refugees have fled the Middle East – first Iraq, now
Syria – are the invasions and imperial mayhem of Britain, the
United States, France, the European Union and NATO. Before that,
there was the willful destruction of Yugoslavia. Before that, there
was the theft of Palestine and the imposition of Israel.
The pith
helmets may have long gone, but the blood has never dried. A
Nineteenth Century contempt for countries and peoples, depending on
their degree of colonial usefulness, remains a centerpiece of modern
“globalization,” with its perverse socialism for the rich and
capitalism for the poor: its freedom for capital and denial of
freedom to labor; its perfidious politicians and politicized civil
servants.
Saying
‘No More’
All this has
now come home to Europe, enriching the likes of Tony Blair and
impoverishing and disempowering millions. On June 23, the British
said “no more.”
The most
effective propagandists of the “European ideal” have not been the
far Right, but an insufferably patrician class for whom metropolitan
London is the United Kingdom. Its leading members see themselves as
liberal, enlightened, cultivated tribunes of the Twenty-first Century
zeitgeist, even “cool.” What they really are is a bourgeoisie
with insatiable consumerist tastes and ancient instincts of their own
superiority.
In their
house paper, the Guardian, they have gloated, day after day, at those
who would even consider the European Union profoundly undemocratic, a
source of social injustice and a virulent extremism known as
“neoliberalism.”
The aim of
this extremism is to install a permanent, capitalist theocracy that
ensures a two-thirds society, with the majority divided and indebted,
managed by a corporate class, and a permanent working poor.
In Britain
today, 63 per cent of poor children grow up in families where one
member is working. For them, the trap has closed. More than 600,000
residents of Britain’s second city, Greater Manchester, are,
reports a study, “experiencing the effects of extreme poverty”
and 1.6 million are slipping into penury.
Little of
this social catastrophe is acknowledged in the bourgeois-controlled
media, notably the Oxbridge-dominated BBC. During the referendum
campaign, almost no insightful analysis was allowed to intrude upon
the clichéd hysteria about “leaving Europe,” as if Britain was
about to be towed in hostile currents somewhere north of Iceland.
Dismissing
‘These People’
On the
morning after the vote, a BBC radio reporter welcomed politicians to
his studio as old chums. “Well,” he said to “Lord” Peter
Mandelson, the disgraced architect of Blairism, “why do these
people want it so badly?” The “these people” are the majority
of Britons.
The wealthy
war criminal Tony Blair remains a hero of the Mandelson “European”
class, though few will say so these days. The Guardian once described
Blair as “mystical” and has been true to his “project” of
rapacious war. The day after the vote, the columnist Martin Kettle
offered a Brechtian solution to the misuse of democracy by the
masses.
“Now
surely we can agree referendums are bad for Britain,” said the
headline over his full-page piece. The “we” was unexplained but
understood — just as “these people” is understood. “The
referendum has conferred less legitimacy on politics, not more,”
wrote Kettle, adding: “the verdict on referendums should be a
ruthless one. Never again.”
The kind of
ruthlessness for which Kettle longs is found in Greece, a country now
airbrushed. There, they had a referendum against more austerity and
the result was ignored. Like the Labour Party in Britain, the leaders
of the Syriza government in Athens are the products of an affluent,
highly privileged, educated middle class, groomed in the fakery and
political treachery of post-modernism.
The Greek
people courageously used the referendum to demand their government
seek “better terms” with a venal status quo in Brussels that was
crushing the life out of their country. They were betrayed, as the
British would have been betrayed.
On Friday,
the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was asked by the BBC if he
would pay tribute to the soon-to-be-departed Cameron, his comrade in
the “remain” campaign. Corbyn fulsomely praised Cameron’s
“dignity” and noted his backing for gay marriage and his apology
to the Irish families of the dead of Bloody Sunday.
Corbyn said
nothing about Cameron’s divisiveness, his brutal austerity
policies, his lies about “protecting” the Health Service. Neither
did he remind people of the warmongering of the Cameron government:
the dispatch of British special forces to Libya and British bomb
aimers to Saudi Arabia and, above all, the beckoning of World War
Three.
Ignoring
Russia’s Memories
In the week
of the referendum vote, no British politician and, to my knowledge,
no journalist referred to Vladimir Putin’s speech in St. Petersburg
commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Nazi Germany’s
invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Soviet victory –
at a cost of 27 million Soviet lives and the majority of all German
forces – won the Second World War.
Putin
likened the current frenzied build up of NATO troops and war materiel
on Russia’s western borders to the Third Reich’s Operation
Barbarossa. NATO’s exercises in Poland were the biggest since the
Nazi invasion; Operation Anaconda had simulated an attack on Russia,
presumably with nuclear weapons.
On the eve
of the referendum, the quisling secretary-general of NATO, Jens
Stoltenberg, warned Britons they would be endangering “peace and
security” if they voted to leave the E.U. The millions who ignored
him and Cameron, Osborne, Corbyn, Obama and the man who runs the Bank
of England may, just may, have struck a blow for real peace and
democracy in Europe.
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