http://www.worldpress.org/Europe/2008.cfm
Historian Mark Curtis has written:
1. 'Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses' (2004)
2. 'Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World' (2003)
Published by Vintage.
Paul Cochrane, at Worldpress.org , 6 January 2005, reviewed Curtis's books. He wrote:
According to new research, Britain bears “significant responsibility” since 1945 for the direct or indirect deaths of 8.6 million to 13.5 million people throughout the world from military interventions and at the hands of regimes strongly supported by Britain.
Curtis said he came up with the term “Unpeople” because he thought it adequately described the British government’s attitude towards people who are expendable in Britain’s pursuit of economic and political goals.
“Last year,” Curtis said in a phone interview, “there was a British army officer who was quoted in Iraq as saying the Americans view the Iraqis only as Untermenschen, the Nazi concept of subhuman. In a way, the British have no real different regard for Iraqis than Americans."
According to Curtis:
1. The purpose of British foreign policy is, and always has been, to ensure that 'the global economy is organized to benefit western corporations.'
2. "Britain is a very centralized decision making system at the end of the day, and there is only a democratic façade really.”
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http://www.medialens.org/articles/book_reviews/dc_mc_web_of_deceit.html
'Web of Deceit. Britain's Real Role in the World' by Mark Curtis was reviewed by David Cromwell at medialens.org
Using formerly secret UK government files, Curtis describes the complicity of successive British governments, whether Labour or Conservative, in supporting the US and in repressing people in such countries as Kenya and Malayia.
Cromwell writes:
"At the Labour party conference in 2001, Blair declared: 'I tell you, if Rwanda happened again today as it did in 1994, when a million people were slaughtered in cold blood, we would have a moral duty to act.'
"The mainstream media reported those words without challenge, omitting to mention that the British government had contributed to genocide in Rwanda."
As Curtis points out:
'Britain used its diplomatic weight to reduce severely a UN force that, according to military officers on the ground, could have prevented the killings. It then helped ensure the delay of other plans for intervention, which sent a direct green light to the murderers in Rwanda to continue. Britain also refused to provide the capability for other states to intervene, while blaming the lack of such capability on the UN.'
Curtis refers to the deaths of 3 million in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Curtis writes:
"Britain sold arms to Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola, who intervened to support the DRC regime, at the same time as supplying Uganda and Rwanda, who were fighting the DRC and its allies."
The International Institute for Security Studies in South Africa commented:
"Britain is inflaming the situation by arming both sides."
Curtis demonstrates the immorality of British foreign policy in such places as:
1. Iraq
2.Afghanistan
3. Kosovo
4. Indonesia
5. Israel
6. Russia
7. Turkey
8. Saudi Arabia
Curtis describes how the media helps the elite by reporting only some of the truth.
Curtis explains that "the media definition of 'objective' in reality means working within the consensus among the elite."
He continues: "The liberal intelligentsia in Britain is in my view guilty of helping to weave a collective web of deceit.. To read many mainstream commentators' writings on Britain's role in the world is to enter a surreal, Kafkaesque world where the reality is often the direct opposite of what is contended and where the startling assumptions are frighteningly supportive of state power."
The Guardian's Polly Toynbee wrote that Blair's speech at the October 2001 Labour party conference "will stand as a moment British politics became vigorously, unashamedly, social democratic. The day it became missionary and almost Swedish in pursuit of universal justice". Toynbee noted Blair's "noble sentiments for a new world order", and that he declared "war on poverty, tyranny and injustice while barely using the word 'war' at all". The article was entitled: "He promised to take on the world. And I believed him".
The media, including the BBC and the Guardian, spread Blair's lies before the Iraq war.
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