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A World War has Begun: Break the Silence
Posted By John Pilger On March 23, 2016 @ 2:10 am In articles 2015,Leading
Article,Top Stories | Comments Disabled
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 cancer 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 thinkable."
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.
Today, the long sleep may be over. The young are stirring again. Gradually.
The thousands in Britain who supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader are
part of this awakening - as are those who rallied to support Senator Bernie
Sanders.
In Britain last week, Jeremy Corbyn's closest ally, his shadow treasurer
John McDonnell, committed a Labour government to pay off the debts of
piratical banks and, in effect, to continue so-called austerity.
In the US, Bernie Sanders has promised to support Clinton if or when she's
nominated. He, too, has voted for America's use of violence against
countries when he thinks it's "right". He says Obama has done "a great job".
In Australia, there is a kind of mortuary politics, in which tedious
parliamentary games are played out in the media while refugees and
Indigenous people are persecuted and inequality grows, along with the danger
of war. The government of Malcolm Turnbull has just announced a so-called
defence budget of $195 billion that is a drive to war. There was no debate.
Silence.
What has happened to the great tradition of popular direct action,
unfettered to parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment
required to begin the long journey to a better, just and peaceful world?
Where are the dissidents in art, film, the theatre, literature?
Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first
nuclear missile is fired?
This is an edited version of an address by John Pilger at the University of
Sydney, entitled A World War Has Begun.
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- www.counterpunch.org - http://www.counterpunch.org - ;
A World War has Begun: Break the Silence
Posted By John Pilger On March 23, 2016 @ 2:10 am In articles 2015,Leading
Article,Top Stories | Comments Disabled
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 cancer 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 thinkable."
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.
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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.
Today, the long sleep may be over. The young are stirring again. Gradually.
The thousands in Britain who supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader are
part of this awakening - as are those who rallied to support Senator Bernie
Sanders.
In Britain last week, Jeremy Corbyn's closest ally, his shadow treasurer
John McDonnell, committed a Labour government to pay off the debts of
piratical banks and, in effect, to continue so-called austerity.
In the US, Bernie Sanders has promised to support Clinton if or when she's
nominated. He, too, has voted for America's use of violence against
countries when he thinks it's "right". He says Obama has done "a great job".
In Australia, there is a kind of mortuary politics, in which tedious
parliamentary games are played out in the media while refugees and
Indigenous people are persecuted and inequality grows, along with the danger
of war. The government of Malcolm Turnbull has just announced a so-called
defence budget of $195 billion that is a drive to war. There was no debate.
Silence.
What has happened to the great tradition of popular direct action,
unfettered to parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment
required to begin the long journey to a better, just and peaceful world?
Where are the dissidents in art, film, the theatre, literature?
Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first
nuclear missile is fired?
This is an edited version of an address by John Pilger at the University of
Sydney, entitled A World War Has Begun.
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. Article printed from www.counterpunch.org:
http://www.counterpunch.org ;
. URL to article:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/23/a-world-war-has-begun-break-the-silen
ce/