A World War Has Begun: Break the Silence
Donald Trump is a maverick, unlike Hillary Clinton, argues John Pilger.
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 12 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 center 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 30 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 18
months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War II –
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
 |
| INVASION OF USA IN IRAQ |
(H)ad journalists and broadcasters done their job ... hundreds of
thousands of men, women and children would be alive today.
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 U.S. 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 skepticism.
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 defenseless 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.
The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton.
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 sodomized 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 U.S. 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 U.S.,
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 defense
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.
