As usual, John Pilger is spot-on in his analysis.
PILGER:
‘A World War Has Begun. Now Break the Silence.’
“In
2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of
Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the
world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A
torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It was all fake. He was lying.”
I
have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of
Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people
where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue
by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”
Few
seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the
nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini Island. Sixty-six nuclear
devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands
between 1946 and 1958 – the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every
day for twelve years. Bikini is silent today, mutated and
contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation.
Nothing
moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are
alive with radiation. My shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger
counter.
Standing
on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away
into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb
they called “Bravo”. The explosion poisoned people and their
environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.
On
my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an
American magazine called Women’s Health. On the cover was a smiling
woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: “You,
too, can have a bikini body.” A
few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women
who had very different “bikini bodies;” each had suffered thyroid
and other life-threatening cancers.
Unlike
the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the
victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious superpower that is today more
dangerous than ever.
I
relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction
that has consumed so many of us. The founder of modern propaganda,
Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as “the
conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions” of
democratic societies. He called it an “invisible
government”.
How
many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a
war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change
instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.
In
2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of
Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the
world free from nuclear weapons”.
People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from
the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
It
was all fake. He was lying.
The
Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear
warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories.
Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any
American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1
trillion.
A
mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There
has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former
Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, “Going
smaller [makes using this nuclear] weapon more thinkabиle.”
In
the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces
since World War Two – led by the United States – is taking place
along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the
Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat
to Russia.
Ukraine
– once part of the Soviet Union – has become a CIA theme park.
Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a
regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with
Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the
political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They
openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of
the Russian speaking minority.
This
is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.
In
Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – next door to Russia – the US
military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This
extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with
silence in the West.
What
makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel
campaign against China.
Seldom
a day passes when China is not elevated to the status of a “threat.”
According to Admiral Harry Harris, the US Pacific commander, China
is “building
a great wall of sand in the South China Sea.”
What
he is referring to is China building airstrips in the Spratly
Islands, which are the subject of a dispute with the Philippines –
a dispute without priority until Washington pressured and bribed the
government in Manila and the Pentagon launched a propaganda campaign
called “freedom of navigation.”
What
does this really mean? It means freedom for American warships to
patrol and dominate the coastal waters of China. Try to imagine the
American reaction if Chinese warships did the same off the coast of
California.
I
made a film called ‘The War You Don’t See,’ in which I
interviewed distinguished journalists in America and Britain:
reporters such as Dan Rather of CBS, Rageh Omar of the BBC, David
Rose of the Observer.
All
of them said that had journalists and broadcasters done their job and
questioned the propaganda that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of
mass destruction; had the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair not
been amplified and echoed by journalists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq
might not have happened, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and
children would be alive today.
The
propaganda laying the ground for a war against Russia and/or China is
no different in principle. To my knowledge, no journalist in the
Western “mainstream” – a Dan Rather equivalent, say – asks
why China is building airstrips in the South China Sea.
The
answer ought to be glaringly obvious. The United States is encircling
China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle
groups, nuclear-armed bombers.
This
lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the
Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand,
Okinawa, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America
has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence
by media; war by media.
In
2015, in high secrecy, the US and Australia staged the biggest single
air-sea military exercise in recent history, known as Talisman Sabre.
Its aim was to rehearse an Air-Sea Battle Plan, blocking sea lanes –
such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits – that cut
off China’s access to oil, gas and other vital raw materials from
the Middle East and Africa.
In
the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump
is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious;
but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our
scepticism.
Trump’s
views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of
David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the
United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.
According
to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is “unleashing
the dark forces of violence” in
the United States. Unleashing them?
This
is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police wage
a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country that has
attacked and sought to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of
them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing
the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.
No
country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America’s
wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been
launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats:
Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.
In
1947, a series of National Security Council directives described the
paramount aim of American foreign policy as “a
world substantially made over in [America’s] own image.” The
ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans.
Or else.
Heretics would be converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed.
Donald
Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the
invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with
Russia and China.
The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but
Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and
violence of a system whose vaunted “exceptionalism” is
totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.
As
presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the
first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies – just as
Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals
swallowed his nonsense about “hope.” And the drool goes on.
Described
by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones as “funny,
charming, with a coolness that eludes practically every other
politician,” Obama
the other day sent drones to slaughter 150 people in Somalia. He
kills people usually on Tuesdays, according to the New York Times,
when he is handed a list of candidates for death by drone. So cool.
In
the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton threatened
to “totally
obliterate” Iran
with nuclear weapons. As Secretary of State under Obama, she
participated in the overthrow of the democratic government of
Honduras. Her contribution to the destruction of Libya in 2011 was
almost gleeful. When the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, was publicly
sodomised with a knife – a murder made possible by American
logistics – Clinton gloated over his death: “We
came, we saw, he died.”
One
of Clinton’s closest allies is Madeleine Albright, the former
secretary of State, who has attacked young women for not supporting
“Hillary.” This is the same Madeleine Albright who infamously
celebrated on TV the death of half a million Iraqi children as “worth
it”.
Among
Clinton’s biggest backers are the Israel lobby and the arms
companies that fuel the violence in the Middle East. She and her
husband have received a fortune from Wall Street. And yet, she is
about to be ordained the women’s candidate, to see off the evil
Trump, the official demon. Her supporters include distinguished
feminists: the likes of Gloria Steinem in the US and Anne Summers in
Australia.
A
generation ago, a post-modern cult now known as “identity politics”
stopped many intelligent, liberal-minded people examining the causes
and individuals they supported, such as the fakery of Obama and
Clinton; such as bogus progressive movements like Syriza in Greece,
which betrayed the people of that country and allied with their
enemies.
Self-absorption,
a kind of “me-ism”, became the new zeitgeist in privileged
western societies and signaled the demise of great collective
movements against war, social injustice, inequality, racism and
sexism…
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