What Mr Pilger fails to remember is the billions of roubles Russian plowed into the willing coffers of the various Arab militaries during the 60's & 70's with an avowed mutual strategy of the annihilation Israel. Russia hoped to open a second front against the USA (first was Vietnam), the Arabs wanted to redeem their esteem post 1948. It is always so easy to blame the USA & 'The West' for the ills of the world from Mr Pilger's perspective.

Vk3AUU,

Madiba Mandela also was friendly with Ghaddafi, but I'm certainly not going to hold that against him. It's called politics, or more euphemistically, diplomacy. And what's sauce for the South African goose is also sauce for the US and UK ganders :) Barking up the wrong tree, VK3AUU.

No, I certainly don't think that the US or the West are responasible for the situation in Libya, you got that right: Ghaddafi has had something to do with it. So have the Russians, Chinese, Turks, everybody who either gave them arms or money to get him on-side, or tried to make a buck out of his people's resources. Ghaddafi is not and never has been anybody's puppet, not the West's, not Russia's: he is his own demagogue.

Back to reality: the people of Libya will liberate their country, with or without outside help, it's up to them to ask for it or not.

The people are overthrowing a dictatorship. John Pilger tries with all his might to twist this into something anti-US (one suspects, to divert attention away from the sins of dictators like Ghaddafi). It has nothing much to do with the US. It has everything to do with the Libyan people, who also are not, and never have been, puppets.

I hope that they never will be and that they will forge their own democratic structures, free of all outside economic and political interference, and as distant as possible from medieval Islamism.

Joe

It's a must read post. The people's triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism. How do I convince those who still think corporations are their friend, otherwise?

What I found interesting was the USA's incredibly slow pace of endorsing the pro-democracy uprising until it was absolutely certain the insurgents were going to win.

Of course, when you need the favor of every nasty dictator in the region to retain political influence in the area, you can't appear TOO enthusiastic to a movement which is no good for them.

John Pilger blames America for poverty and unhappiness in the Middle East, what then of the billions upon billions of dollars going in to those countries from oil dollars? What are the leaders doing with that money, Not sharing it with the Arab people it would seem.

He also indulges in a twisted kind of supremacist thinking in believing that the Arab people are not capable of doing anything not orchestrated by America.

John Pilger is an old left wing hippie who has failed to move on in his thinking 40years later, as are a lot of people from that generation.
Julian Assange also grew up under the influence of a left wing hippie single mother. I know the mind set of the hippie generation well, I grew up in that era too, believing in the idea that with love and tolerance and sharing and socialist principles we could change the world.
I know now that those ideas won’t change the world.

John Pilger and Julian Assange think they are smarter than others who do not perceive America as the badie and so they keep on trying to enlighten us as to our stupidity. What they fail to realise is a lot of us do see and know the manipulating and political scheming that America and the west has been and is capable of. Heavens knows we’ve had it shoved down our throats all our lives by the old academics and hippies of the 70’s generation.
It is, however, them who fail to realise that America doesn’t have the copywrite on this kind of behaviour and the countries they defend are indulging in the same political and manipulative and military murk right up to their arm pits too.

John and Julian with their supremacist thinking don’t realise the people in these countries are just as intelligent as them and regularly manipulate and pull the wool over the eyes of Western media reporters like them.

Yes, Hazza,

A good kick in the nuts if they intervene, and another good kick up the @rse if they don't. The joys of being a bystander !

Meanwhile, al Jazeera has an interesting video that some confused fool accidentally put on a left-wing blog, about Ghaddafi's links with Latin American countries:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-HvdqjsqXM&feature=player_embedded

detailing the cosy links between Ghaddafi and Ortega in Nicaragua, Chavez in Venezuela and the Castro dynasty in Cuba.

All fallen heroes :(

But, Hazza, I think I've discovered the word that John Pilger dare not speak:

INTEGRITY