“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” George Orwell, 1984.

On the opening day of the bombing last week, I had to work hard to find out what the Iraqi government thought of the wave of attacks on Iraq by the USA. Think about that: a country undergoes dozens of airstrikes that receive massive international media coverage – our screens are filled with jets roaring off aircraft carriers, missiles bustling across the sky, flashes of explosions signalling death and destruction – and it takes a dogged bit of digging to find out what that country actually makes of the attack.

I feel we are living in Orwell’s dystopian world of constant war, not here, but somewhere off in the distance. Meanwhile, our ears, lungs and eyes are filled with the fog of perpetual propaganda. The battle for truth is being fought – and lost. Can we stir ourselves?

This past week, the mainstream media (MSM) – BBC, Guardian, New York Times, etc – were loaded with quotes from White House press secretaries, the President, generals and anglophone pundits … but was largely uninterested in the views of the nominally sovereign nation of Iraq – an ally of America, no less – which, along with Syria, was undergoing this latest round of bombing. The MSM largely conforms to the ideological orthodoxy of the American superstate – purging or diminishing to short........

© Pearls and Irritations