This is an edited version of an address by John Pilger at the University of Sydney, entitled A World War Has Begun:
Global Research, March 22, 2016
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
new 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?
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © John Pilger, Global Research, 2016
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