[Media-watch] Unpeople - Mark Curtis book

[David McKnight]

Unpeople
Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses 
http://www.markcurtis.info/
BRITAIN COMPLICIT IN THE DEATHS OF TEN MILLION PEOPLE SINCE 1945
These are Unpeople - those whose lives are seen as expendable in the pursuit of Britain's economic and political goals.

Historian Mark Curtis pieces together the Blair government's "public deception campaign" on Iraq and reveals government plans to increase "information operations" directed towards the public. Citing official documents, it discloses that the government has in effect abandoned a commitment to international law and is poised for a new period of global military intervention in alliance with the US.

Unpeople documents recently declassified government files to reveal: 

  a.. British support for the 1963 killings in Iraq that brought Saddam's Ba'ath party to power 
  b.. British arming of Baghdad regimes' brutal aggression against the Kurds throughout the 1960s 
  c.. A covert British military role in the US war in Vietnam and secret correspondence from Wilson and Heath privately backing the US 
  d.. The Heath government's support for the Idi Amin coup in Uganda in 1971 and the 1973 Pinochet coup in Chile 
  e.. Covert operations to overthrow governments in Indonesia and Guyana 
  f.. Previous "dirty wars" in the Middle East, involving extensive war crimes, in Oman, Aden and Yemen 
The new research calculates the number of deaths from British military interventions and at the hands of regimes strongly supported by Britain. Britain bears "significant responsibility" for between 8-13 million deaths. 

To order the book: 
online: go to www.word-power.co.uk or www.randomhouse.co.uk/vintage
telephone: +44-1206-356000
fax: +44-1206-255930
mail: TBS Distribution Centre, 
Colchester Road, 
Frating Green, Colchester, 
Essex CO7 7DW
Please quote ISBN 0099469723

Author's Introduction

Mark Curtis
Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses
This book is an attempt to uncover the reality of British foreign policy since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It also analyses several major episodes in Britain's past foreign policy, exploring in detail formerly secret government files which have been ignored by mainstream commentators. They expose the truth behind British governments' supposed commitment to grand principles such as human rights, democracy, peace and overseas development.

Britain is bogged down in an unpopular occupation in the Middle East, the state has become widely distrusted by the public, accusations of spying on the UN have further undermined its international role, while Britain has effectively been marginalised in the EU. Seen from within the establishment, Tony Blair has become the greatest public liability since Anthony Eden, whose mistake was not his invasion of a foreign country (normal British practice) but his defeat, in the Suez crisis of 1956.

Massive public opposition to the invasion of Iraq has troubled the government and may prove to have deterred it from other ventures. Yet the course of New Labour's foreign policy since the invasion has been disastrous in terms of human rights, and is continuing to occur outside any meaningful democratic scrutiny.

British foreign policy is guided by a tiny elite - not just the handful of ministers in successive governments, but the civil servants, ambassadors, advisers and other unaccountable Whitehall mandarins around them, who set the country's agenda and priorities, and define its role within the world. 

Since March 2003, these decision-makers have been implementing a series of remarkable steps: first, Britain is deepening its support for state terrorism in a number of countries; second, unprecedented plans are being developed to increase Britain's ability to intervene militarily around the world; third, the government is increasing its state propaganda operations, directed towards the British public; and fourth, Whitehall planners have in effect announced they are no longer bound by international law. 

The principal victims of British policies are Unpeople - those whose lives are deemed worthless, expendable in the pursuit of power and commercial gain. They are the modern equivalent of the 'savages' of colonial days, who could be mown down by British guns in virtual secrecy, or else in circumstances where the perpetrators were hailed as the upholders of civilisation. 

The concept of Unpeople is central to each of the past and current British policies considered in this book. Through its own intervention, and its support of key allies such as the United States and various repressive regimes, Britain has been, and continues to be, a systematic and serious abuser of human rights. I have calculated that Britain bears significant responsibility for around 10 million deaths since 1945 (see table), including Nigerians, Indonesians, Arabians, Ugandans, Chileans, Vietnamese and many others. Often, the policies responsible are unknown to the public and remain unresearched by journalists and academics.

In this book, I aim to document for the first time the secret record of certain episodes in government planning. The declassified files to which I refer are instructive not only for the light they throw on the past. They are also directly relevant to current British foreign policy surrounding Iraq, military intervention and the 'war against terror'. British interests and priorities have changed very little over time; essentially, the only variation has been in the tactics used to achieve them. 

Of the basic principles that guided the decisions taken in these files, there are three which seem particularly apposite when considering current events.

The first is that British ministers' lying to the public is systematic and normal. Many people were shocked at the extent to which Tony Blair lied over Iraq; some might still be unable to believe that he did. But in every case I have ever researched on past British foreign policy, the files show that ministers and officials have systematically misled the public. The culture of lying to and misleading the electorate is deeply embedded in British policy-making. 

A second, related principle is that policy-makers are usually frank about their real goals in the secret record. This makes declassified files a good basis on which to understand their actual objectives. This gap between private goals and public claims is not usually the result, in my view, of a conscious conspiracy. Certainly, planned state propaganda has been a key element in British foreign policy; yet the underlying strategy of misleading the public springs from a less conscious, endemic contempt for the general population. The foreign-policy decision-making system is so secretive, elitist and unaccountable that policy-makers know they can get away with almost anything, and they will deploy whatever arguments are needed to do this.

The third basic principle is that humanitarian concerns do not figure at all in the rationale behind British foreign policy. In the thousands of government files I have looked through for this and other books, I have barely seen any reference to human rights at all. Where such concerns are invoked, they are only for public-relations purposes. 

Currently, many mainstream commentators would have us believe that there is a 'Blair doctrine', based on military intervention for humanitarian purposes. This is an act of faith on the part of those commentators, a good example of how the public proclamations of leaders are used unquestioningly to set the framework of analysis within the liberal political culture. If there is a Blair doctrine, it does indeed involve an unprecedented degree of military intervention - but to achieve some very traditional goals. The actual impact of foreign policies on foreign people is as irrelevant now as it ever has been.



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