Pilger writes: "As the U.S. government plunges toward war with nuclear-armed
Russia and/or China, there is an unsettling silence - or unnerving consensus
- regarding the potential extinction of human existence."
The Russian military. (photo: Picture Alliance)
Eerie Silence About a New World War
By John Pilger, Consortium News
28 May 16
As the U.S. government plunges toward war with nuclear-armed Russia and/or
China, there is an unsettling silence - or unnerving consensus - regarding
the potential extinction of human existence, as John Pilger observes.
Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the
silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I
was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing
to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating
violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party's rigged convention.
The great counter revolution had begun.
The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King Jr., had dared
link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When
Janis Joplin sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose,"
she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America's victims in faraway
places.
"We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your
freedom. Now don't you forget it." So said a National Parks Service guide as
I filmed last week at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He was addressing
a school party of young teenagers in bright orange T-shirts. As if by rote,
he inverted the truth about Vietnam into an unchallenged lie.
The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and
dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young
minds, not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own
lives. A friend of mine, a Marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam, was
often asked, "Which side did you fight on?"
A few years ago, I attended a popular exhibition called "The Price of
Freedom" at the venerable Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The lines
of ordinary people, mostly children shuffling through a Santa's grotto of
revisionism, were dispensed a variety of lies: the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved "a million lives"; Iraq was "liberated [by] air
strikes of unprecedented precision." The theme was unerringly heroic: only
Americans pay the price of freedom.
No Debate about Endless War
The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of Donald
Trump and Bernie Sanders but also for the resilience of an enduring silence
about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of the members of the
United Nations have felt Washington's boot, overturning governments,
subverting democracy, imposing blockades and boycotts. Most of the
presidents responsible have been liberal - Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter,
Clinton, Obama.
The breathtaking record of perfidy is so mutated in the public mind, wrote
the late Harold Pinter, that it "never happened. . Nothing ever happened.
Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of
no interest. It didn't matter."
Pinter expressed a mock admiration for what he called "a quite clinical
manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal
good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
Take Obama. As he prepares to leave office, the fawning has begun all over
again. He is "cool." One of the more violent presidents, Obama gave full
reign to the Pentagon war-making apparatus of his discredited predecessor.
He prosecuted more whistleblowers - truth-tellers - than any president. He
pronounced Chelsea Manning guilty before she was tried. Today, Obama runs an
unprecedented worldwide campaign of terrorism and murder by drone.
In 2009, Obama promised to help "rid the world of nuclear weapons" and was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No American president has built more nuclear
warheads than Obama. He is "modernizing" America's doomsday arsenal,
including a new "mini" nuclear weapon whose size and "smart" technology,
says a leading general, ensure its use is "no longer unthinkable."
James Bradley, the best-selling author of Flags of Our Fathers and son of
one of the U.S. Marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, said, "[One] great
myth we're seeing play out is that of Obama as some kind of peaceful guy
who's trying to get rid of nuclear weapons. He's the biggest nuclear warrior
there is. He's committed us to a ruinous course of spending a trillion
dollars on more nuclear weapons. Somehow, people live in this fantasy that
because he gives vague news conferences and speeches and feel-good photo-ops
that somehow that's attached to actual policy. It isn't."
Obama's Legacy
On Obama's watch, a second Cold War is under way. The Russian president is a
pantomime villain; the Chinese are not yet back to their sinister pig-tailed
caricature - when all Chinese were banned from the United States - but the
media warriors are working on it.
Neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders has mentioned any of this. There
is no risk and no danger for the United States and all of us. For them, the
greatest military build-up on the borders of Russia since World War Two has
not happened. On May 11, Romania went "live" with a NATO "missile defense"
base that strengthens the ability of first-strike American missiles to
strike at the heart of Russia, the world's second nuclear power.
In Asia, the Pentagon is sending ships, planes and special forces to the
Philippines to threaten China. The U.S. already encircles China with
hundreds of military bases that curve in an arc up from Australia, to Asia
and across to Afghanistan. Obama calls this a "pivot."
As a direct consequence, China reportedly has changed its nuclear weapons
policy from no-first-use to high alert and put to sea submarines with
nuclear weapons. The escalator is quickening.
It was Hillary Clinton who, as Secretary of State in 2010, elevated the
competing territorial claims for rocks and reef in the South China Sea to an
international issue; CNN and BBC hysteria followed; China was building
airstrips on the disputed islands. In its mammoth war game in 2015,
Operation Talisman Sabre, the U.S. practiced "choking" the Straits of
Malacca through which pass most of China's oil and trade. This was not news.
Clinton declared that America had a "national interest" in these Asian
waters. The Philippines and Vietnam were encouraged and bribed to pursue
their claims and old enmities against China. In America, people are being
primed to see any Chinese defensive position as offensive, and so the ground
is laid for rapid escalation. A similar strategy of provocation and
propaganda is applied to Russia.
A 'Feminism' of Bloody Coups
Clinton, the "women's candidate," leaves a trail of bloody coups: in
Honduras, in Libya (plus the murder of the Libyan president) and Ukraine.
The latter is now a CIA theme park swarming with Nazis and the frontline of
a beckoning war with Russia. It was through Ukraine - literally, borderland
- that Hitler's Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, which lost 27 million
people. This epic catastrophe remains a presence in Russia. Clinton's
presidential campaign has received money from all but one of the world's ten
biggest arms companies. No other candidate comes close.
Sanders, the hope of many young Americans, is not very different from
Clinton in his proprietorial view of the world beyond the United States. He
backed Bill Clinton's illegal bombing of Serbia. He supports Obama's
terrorism by drone, the provocation of Russia and the return of special
forces (death squads) to Iraq. He has nothing to say on the drumbeat of
threats to China and the accelerating risk of nuclear war. He agrees that
Edward Snowden should stand trial and he calls Hugo Chavez - like him, a
social democrat - "a dead communist dictator." He promises to support
Clinton if she is nominated.
The election of Trump or Clinton is the old illusion of choice that is no
choice: two sides of the same coin. In scapegoating minorities and promising
to "make America great again," Trump is a far-right-wing domestic populist;
yet the danger of Clinton may be more lethal for the world.
"Only Donald Trump has said anything meaningful and critical of U.S. foreign
policy," wrote Stephen Cohen, emeritus professor of Russian History at
Princeton and NYU, one of the few Russia experts in the United States to
speak out about the risk of war.
In a radio broadcast, Cohen referred to critical questions Trump alone had
raised. Among them: why is the United States "everywhere on the globe"? What
is NATO's true mission? Why does the U.S. always pursue regime change in
Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine? Why does Washington treat Russia and Vladimir
Putin as an enemy?
The Trump Hysteria
The hysteria in the liberal media over Trump serves an illusion of "free and
open debate" and "democracy at work." His views on immigrants and Muslims
are grotesque, yet the deporter-in-chief of vulnerable people from America
is not Trump but Obama, whose betrayal of people of color is his legacy:
such as the warehousing of a mostly black prison population, now more
numerous than Stalin's gulag.
This presidential campaign may not be about populism but American
liberalism, an ideology that sees itself as modern and therefore superior
and the one true way. Those on its right wing bear a likeness to Nineteenth
Century Christian imperialists, with a God-given duty to convert or co-opt
or conquer.
In Britain, this is Blairism. The Christian war criminal Tony Blair got away
with his secret preparation for the invasion of Iraq largely because the
liberal political class and media fell for his "cool Britannia." In the
Guardian, the applause was deafening; he was called "mystical." A
distraction known as identity politics, imported from the United States,
rested easily in his care.
History was declared over, class was abolished and gender promoted as
feminism; lots of women became New Labour MPs. They voted on the first day
of Parliament to cut the benefits of single parents, mostly women, as
instructed. A majority voted for an invasion that produced 700,000 Iraqi
widows.
The equivalent in the U.S. is the presence of politically correct warmongers
on the New York Times, the Washington Post and network TV who dominate
political debate. I watched a furious debate on CNN about Trump's
infidelities. It was clear, they said, a man like that could not be trusted
in the White House. No issues were raised. Nothing on the 80 per cent of
Americans whose income has collapsed to 1970s levels. Nothing on the drift
to war.
The received wisdom seems to be "hold your nose" and vote for Clinton:
anyone but Trump. That way, you stop the monster and preserve a system
gagging for another war.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
The Russian military. (photo: Picture Alliance)
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/05/27/eerie-silence-about-a-new-world-war/ht
tps://consortiumnews.com/2016/05/27/eerie-silence-about-a-new-world-war/
Eerie Silence About a New World War
By John Pilger, Consortium News
28 May 16
As the U.S. government plunges toward war with nuclear-armed Russia and/or
China, there is an unsettling silence - or unnerving consensus - regarding
the potential extinction of human existence, as John Pilger observes.
eturning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the
silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I
was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing
to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating
violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party's rigged convention.
The great counter revolution had begun.
The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King Jr., had dared
link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When
Janis Joplin sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose,"
she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America's victims in faraway
places.
"We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your
freedom. Now don't you forget it." So said a National Parks Service guide as
I filmed last week at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He was addressing
a school party of young teenagers in bright orange T-shirts. As if by rote,
he inverted the truth about Vietnam into an unchallenged lie.
The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and
dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young
minds, not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own
lives. A friend of mine, a Marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam, was
often asked, "Which side did you fight on?"
A few years ago, I attended a popular exhibition called "The Price of
Freedom" at the venerable Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The lines
of ordinary people, mostly children shuffling through a Santa's grotto of
revisionism, were dispensed a variety of lies: the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved "a million lives"; Iraq was "liberated [by] air
strikes of unprecedented precision." The theme was unerringly heroic: only
Americans pay the price of freedom.
No Debate about Endless War
The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of Donald
Trump and Bernie Sanders but also for the resilience of an enduring silence
about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of the members of the
United Nations have felt Washington's boot, overturning governments,
subverting democracy, imposing blockades and boycotts. Most of the
presidents responsible have been liberal - Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter,
Clinton, Obama.
The breathtaking record of perfidy is so mutated in the public mind, wrote
the late Harold Pinter, that it "never happened. . Nothing ever happened.
Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of
no interest. It didn't matter."
Pinter expressed a mock admiration for what he called "a quite clinical
manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal
good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
Take Obama. As he prepares to leave office, the fawning has begun all over
again. He is "cool." One of the more violent presidents, Obama gave full
reign to the Pentagon war-making apparatus of his discredited predecessor.
He prosecuted more whistleblowers - truth-tellers - than any president. He
pronounced Chelsea Manning guilty before she was tried. Today, Obama runs an
unprecedented worldwide campaign of terrorism and murder by drone.
In 2009, Obama promised to help "rid the world of nuclear weapons" and was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No American president has built more nuclear
warheads than Obama. He is "modernizing" America's doomsday arsenal,
including a new "mini" nuclear weapon whose size and "smart" technology,
says a leading general, ensure its use is "no longer unthinkable."
James Bradley, the best-selling author of Flags of Our Fathers and son of
one of the U.S. Marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, said, "[One] great
myth we're seeing play out is that of Obama as some kind of peaceful guy
who's trying to get rid of nuclear weapons. He's the biggest nuclear warrior
there is. He's committed us to a ruinous course of spending a trillion
dollars on more nuclear weapons. Somehow, people live in this fantasy that
because he gives vague news conferences and speeches and feel-good photo-ops
that somehow that's attached to actual policy. It isn't."
Obama's Legacy
On Obama's watch, a second Cold War is under way. The Russian president is a
pantomime villain; the Chinese are not yet back to their sinister pig-tailed
caricature - when all Chinese were banned from the United States - but the
media warriors are working on it.
Neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders has mentioned any of this. There
is no risk and no danger for the United States and all of us. For them, the
greatest military build-up on the borders of Russia since World War Two has
not happened. On May 11, Romania went "live" with a NATO "missile defense"
base that strengthens the ability of first-strike American missiles to
strike at the heart of Russia, the world's second nuclear power.
In Asia, the Pentagon is sending ships, planes and special forces to the
Philippines to threaten China. The U.S. already encircles China with
hundreds of military bases that curve in an arc up from Australia, to Asia
and across to Afghanistan. Obama calls this a "pivot."
As a direct consequence, China reportedly has changed its nuclear weapons
policy from no-first-use to high alert and put to sea submarines with
nuclear weapons. The escalator is quickening.
It was Hillary Clinton who, as Secretary of State in 2010, elevated the
competing territorial claims for rocks and reef in the South China Sea to an
international issue; CNN and BBC hysteria followed; China was building
airstrips on the disputed islands. In its mammoth war game in 2015,
Operation Talisman Sabre, the U.S. practiced "choking" the Straits of
Malacca through which pass most of China's oil and trade. This was not news.
Clinton declared that America had a "national interest" in these Asian
waters. The Philippines and Vietnam were encouraged and bribed to pursue
their claims and old enmities against China. In America, people are being
primed to see any Chinese defensive position as offensive, and so the ground
is laid for rapid escalation. A similar strategy of provocation and
propaganda is applied to Russia.
A 'Feminism' of Bloody Coups
Clinton, the "women's candidate," leaves a trail of bloody coups: in
Honduras, in Libya (plus the murder of the Libyan president) and Ukraine.
The latter is now a CIA theme park swarming with Nazis and the frontline of
a beckoning war with Russia. It was through Ukraine - literally, borderland
- that Hitler's Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, which lost 27 million
people. This epic catastrophe remains a presence in Russia. Clinton's
presidential campaign has received money from all but one of the world's ten
biggest arms companies. No other candidate comes close.
Sanders, the hope of many young Americans, is not very different from
Clinton in his proprietorial view of the world beyond the United States. He
backed Bill Clinton's illegal bombing of Serbia. He supports Obama's
terrorism by drone, the provocation of Russia and the return of special
forces (death squads) to Iraq. He has nothing to say on the drumbeat of
threats to China and the accelerating risk of nuclear war. He agrees that
Edward Snowden should stand trial and he calls Hugo Chavez - like him, a
social democrat - "a dead communist dictator." He promises to support
Clinton if she is nominated.
The election of Trump or Clinton is the old illusion of choice that is no
choice: two sides of the same coin. In scapegoating minorities and promising
to "make America great again," Trump is a far-right-wing domestic populist;
yet the danger of Clinton may be more lethal for the world.
"Only Donald Trump has said anything meaningful and critical of U.S. foreign
policy," wrote Stephen Cohen, emeritus professor of Russian History at
Princeton and NYU, one of the few Russia experts in the United States to
speak out about the risk of war.
In a radio broadcast, Cohen referred to critical questions Trump alone had
raised. Among them: why is the United States "everywhere on the globe"? What
is NATO's true mission? Why does the U.S. always pursue regime change in
Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine? Why does Washington treat Russia and Vladimir
Putin as an enemy?
The Trump Hysteria
The hysteria in the liberal media over Trump serves an illusion of "free and
open debate" and "democracy at work." His views on immigrants and Muslims
are grotesque, yet the deporter-in-chief of vulnerable people from America
is not Trump but Obama, whose betrayal of people of color is his legacy:
such as the warehousing of a mostly black prison population, now more
numerous than Stalin's gulag.
This presidential campaign may not be about populism but American
liberalism, an ideology that sees itself as modern and therefore superior
and the one true way. Those on its right wing bear a likeness to Nineteenth
Century Christian imperialists, with a God-given duty to convert or co-opt
or conquer.
In Britain, this is Blairism. The Christian war criminal Tony Blair got away
with his secret preparation for the invasion of Iraq largely because the
liberal political class and media fell for his "cool Britannia." In the
Guardian, the applause was deafening; he was called "mystical." A
distraction known as identity politics, imported from the United States,
rested easily in his care.
History was declared over, class was abolished and gender promoted as
feminism; lots of women became New Labour MPs. They voted on the first day
of Parliament to cut the benefits of single parents, mostly women, as
instructed. A majority voted for an invasion that produced 700,000 Iraqi
widows.
The equivalent in the U.S. is the presence of politically correct warmongers
on the New York Times, the Washington Post and network TV who dominate
political debate. I watched a furious debate on CNN about Trump's
infidelities. It was clear, they said, a man like that could not be trusted
in the White House. No issues were raised. Nothing on the 80 per cent of
Americans whose income has collapsed to 1970s levels. Nothing on the drift
to war.
The received wisdom seems to be "hold your nose" and vote for Clinton:
anyone but Trump. That way, you stop the monster and preserve a system
gagging for another war.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
