The first to be
assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, 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.
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US Imperial Autism and 'Liberal' Media
“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.
OPINION:
Keeping Bernie Honest: Support for Sanders Has to Be Critical
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.
OPINION:
Obama Pushes for TPP, but No Apology for Vietnam War, Hiroshima
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 US 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.”
WATCH: Obama 1st Serving U. S. President to Visit Hiroshima
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
defence” base that aims its first-strike American missiles 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 US 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”.
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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 US practiced “choking” the Straits of
Malacca through which pass most of China's oil and trade. This was not
news.
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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.
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 American
s, 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 US 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 US always pursue regime change in
Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine? Why does Washington treat Russia and
Vladimir Putin as an enemy?
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 colour is his
legacy: such as the warehousing of a mostly black prison population, now
more numerous than Stalin's gulag.
OPINION:
How the Democrats Became The Party of Neoliberalism
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 19
th 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 US are the politically correct warmongers on the New York Times,
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.
SOURCE:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/SilencingPilger-20160527-0015.html 
