De kans op een ander Hiroshima is na 75 jaar groter dan ooit

John Pilger, journalist, schrijver en filmmaker heeft een artikel geschreven op Information Clearing House over de illegale aanval met een atoombom op 6 augustus 1945 van de VS op de Japanse stad Hiroshima, waarvan hij stelt dat deze weer kan gebeuren als we de VS niet weten te stoppen.... Let wel: nu met kernwapens vele malen sterker dan de atoombommen die destijds werden gebruikt op Hiroshima en Nagasaki..... Bij de VS atoomaanval op Hiroshima werden in 1 seconde 80.000 mensen vermoord, intussen zijn er naar schatting 250.000 mensen overleden aan die vreselijke misdaad tegen de menselijkheid...... Pilger wijst in zijn schrijven op China als toekomstig doel voor een eventuele kernaanval van de VS....... 

Een in steen 'gegroefde' schaduw van één van de slachtoffers in Hiroshima......

Pilger verhaalt over zijn bezoeken aan Hiroshima en plekken waar na WOII bovengrondse kernproeven werden gehouden. Voorts wijst hij op alle leugens van de VS die werden en worden verteld om de eerste en tot u nu toe enige aanvallen met een atoombom te bagatelliseren en deze aanvallen te rechtvaardigen.....

De schaduw is alles wat nog over is van deze kinderen die tijdens de atoomaaanval op Hiroshima werden verpulverd......

De pers was in 1945 en de eerste jaren daarna niet vrij om te melden wat zich had voltrokken in Hiroshima (en een paar dagen later in Nagasaki). Zo haalt Pilger de Australische journalist Wilfred Burchett aan die op 5 september 1945 in de Londense krant Daily Express meldde dat hij bij de ziekenhuizen, voor Hiroshima slachtoffers, mensen zag die geen zichtbare verwondingen hadden, maar stierven als vliegen aan wat hij de 'atomic plague' ('atoomplaag') noemde..... Burchett wilde met zijn relaas de wereld waarschuwen voor het gebruik van de atoombom.... Voor zijn schrijven werd Burchetts accreditatie ingenomen (toestemming om te mogen berichten uit Japan) en werd hij te schande gemaakt waarbij zijn naam werd besmeurd, zijn getuigenis over de waarheid werd hem nooit vergeven.....

Hiroshima 6 augustus 1945........

Op 13 september 1945 meldde de New York Times op haar voorpagina dat er geen radioactieve besmetting was de meten in de ruïnes van Hiroshima.... Generaal Farrell ontkende categorisch dat er sprake is van blijvende gevaarlijke radioactieve straling door het gebruik van de atoombom, aldus 'journalist' Willam H. Lawrence......Uiteraard een leugen van enorme proporties......

Al 75 jaar lang wordt aan andere leugen in de lucht gehouden, de leugen dat de aanvallen op Hiroshima en Nagasaki nodig waren om een eind aan WOII en aan het sterven van VS militairen te maken, terwijl er meer dan voldoende bewijs voorhanden is waaruit blijkt dat Japan zich al veel eerder wilde overgeven en dat zelfs met zware consequenties voor het Japanse bewind........ 

Op Radio1 en BNR amper aandacht voor de atoomaanval op Hiroshima, dit in tegenstelling tot bijvoorbeeld de Duitse radio nieuwszenders, al liet men op WDR5 vanmorgen nog eens de leugen horen dat de atoomaanvallen op Hiroshima en Nagasaki nodig waren om een eind aan de oorlog te maken

Henry Stimpson, destijds minister van oorlog liet de toenmalige president Truman zelfs weten dat de luchtmacht van de VS haar vernietigende werk zo grondig had gedaan dat hij bang was dat er zelfs geen steden over waren om de atoombom op uit te proberen....... Truman liet een dag na de aanval op Hiroshima weten dat het experiment was gelukt, hoeveel bewijs wil je verder nog voor de totaal afwezige reden om atoombommen af te werpen op Hiroshima en Nagasaki...???

Atoomproef op Marshall Eilanden juli 1946

Dat uitproberen van atoombommen ging zover dat de VS op 1 maart 1954 op het Bikini atol de eerste waterstofbom (H-bom) liet ontploffen, echter waar de bevolking van dit atol werd gevacueerd, werd een latere test met zo'n bom op het atol Rongelap uitgevoerd zonder de bevolking te evacueren (terwijl men wist dat deze mensen het slachtoffer zouden worden van deze proef, o.a. door de windrichting), de gevolgen waren dan ook vreselijk: doodgeboren baby's en baby's met vreselijke misvormingen, als een paar voorbeelden van de gevolgen van deze proef...... Voorts overleden grote aantallen mensen aan diverse kankers als gevolg van deze test en nog steeds hebben overlevenden te maken met de gevolgen van deze enorme 'dierproef op mensen....' 

De wetenschappers en medici die de bevolking onderzochten na de proef met een H-bom, noemden deze mensen 'meegaande wilden', terwijl die wetenschappers en medici dondersgoed wisten dat deze mensen ('wilden') werden gebruikt als proefdioeren om te zien wat de effecten zijn op de gezondheid van mensen die te maken zouden krijgen met de fallout, als gevolg van een kernoorlog......

 Een paar van de slachtoffers van deze kernproeven:

Pilger gebruikte e.e.a. in zijn film 'The Comin War with China', waarvoor hij het Bikini atol bezocht waar zogezegd de eerste H-bom werd uitgeprobeerd en nog steeds is de radioactieve straling daar veel te hoog…....

Pilger wijst in zijn artikel nog eens op de wil van de VS het kernwapen te gebruiken. De Koude Oorlog strateeg Herman Kahn schreef het boek 'Thinking about the unthinkable', een boek over een te winnen thermonucleaire oorlog. De RAND Corporation, een instituut dat de oorlogen heeft gepland die de VS sinds Vietnam heeft gevoerd, bracht een studie uit met de titel 'War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable', een studie in opdracht van het Pentagon...... Vergeet daarnaast niet de uiterst achterlijke vraag van Trump toen hij net aan het bewind was: 'we hebben kernwapens, waarom gebruiken we ze niet?' 

Al moet ik toegeven dat het wat betreft oorlogszucht en de inzet van kernwapens bij de Democraten niet veel beter is gesteld, gezien de hiervoor aangehaalde uitspraak van Obama dat ook hij het kernwapen niet langer ziet als een vergeldings- of afschrikkingswapen, maar als een wapen dat hij desnoods als eerste in zou zetten...... En ja, ook Obama is niet alleen de eerste president die de volle 2 termijnen in oorlogen was verwikkeld, maar hij begon ook nog eens 2 illegale oorlogen, die tegen Libië en Syrië, bovendien zijn hij en zijn minister van buitenlandse zaken destijds, Hillary Clinton, direct verantwoordelijk voor de oorlog in Oost-Oekraïne....... (Hillary Clinton organiseerde en betaalde de coup tegen de democratisch gekozen president Janoekovitsj, dit kostte de VS 4 miljard dollar!! De megalomane psychopaat Clinton wilde overigens de Stille Oceaan hernoemen en had daar de American Sea voor in gedachten, zo blijkt uit het artikel van Pilger....)  

We moeten van alle kernwapens af, om te beginnen met de kernwapens die liggen opgeslagen op luchtmachtbasis Volkel, kernwapens waarover Nederland zelfs geen zeggenschap heeft, maar waarvoor ons land wel als één van de eerste doelen zal dienen als de VS zo gek zou zijn om China dan wel Rusland aan te vallen met kernwapens...... Ex-president van de VS Obama (tevens winnaar van de Nobelprijs voor de Vrede.....), de huidige president Trump, ex-premier van Groot-Brittannië May en de huidige premier Johnson, hebben zich het recht toegeëigend als eerste het kernwapen te gebruiken, dus niet langer als vergeldingswapen, of als wapen ter afschrikking van 'buitenlandse agressie.....' (wie zijn er internationaal vooral agressief?? Juist, het westen onder aanvoering van de VS!!) Daarmee is het gebruik van het kernwapen dichterbij dan ooit tevoren..... Men heeft zelfs tactische kernwapens ontwikkeld die gebruikt kunnen worden op het slagveld (beter: slachtveld..), echter elk gebruik van een kernwapen zal leiden tot gebruik van meer en zwaardere kernwapens en daarmee zal het voortbestaan van de mens op het spel komen te staan...

Hoe is het mogelijk dat onze opvolgende regeringen met de partijen CDA, VVD, PvdA, D66 en ChristenUnie (en heel even de PVV), akkoord zijn gegaan met de opslag van kernwapens waar het geen zeggenschap over heeft.... Regeringen die het gebruik van deze massavernietigingswapens overlaten aan een staat die na het eind van WOII (maar inclusief de aanvallen op Hiroshima en Nagasaki) bekend staat als de grootste oorlogsmisdadiger, die na die oorlog de ene na de andere illegale oorlog is begonnen, waarbij tot nu toe ruim meer dan 22,5 miljoen mensen werden vermoord..... (en dat niet zelden met de hulp van andere NAVO-lidstaten als Nederland......) Sterker nog: een paar van die regeringen zijn verantwoordelijk voor de keus van de JSF, puur en alleen omdat die nepstraaljagers de opgeslagen kernwapens van Volkel kunnen vervoeren en afwerpen....... En dan te bedenken dat de VS het enige land is dat ooit atoombommen heeft gebruikt tegen een burgerbevolking, aanvallen die we vandaag en op 9 augustus herdenken als enorme oorlogsmisdaden en verschrikkelijke misdaden tegen de menselijkheid (9 augustus 1945: de atoomaanval op Nagasaki)......

Alle kernwapens moeten als de donder weg uit Nederland!! De hoogste tijd dat ook Rutte 3 (NB met 2 christelijke partijen!!) kiest voor de mensheid en niet voor een niet te winnen kernoorlog!!

Voor het volgende artikel heb je aan het eind de mogelijkheid te klikken voor een 'Dutch vertaling', dat neemt wel enige tijd in beslag (denk aan tientallen seconden, niet minuten):

Another Hiroshima is Coming… Unless We Stop It Now

By John Pilger

July 04, 2020 "Information Clearing House" - When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open.

At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite.

I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then I walked down to the river where the survivors still lived in shanties.

I met a man called Yukio, whose chest was etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.

He described a huge flash over the city, “a bluish light, something like an electrical short”, after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. “I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead.”

Nine years later, I returned to look for him and he was dead from leukaemia.
“No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin” said The New York Times front page on 13 September, 1945, a classic of planted disinformation. “General Farrell,” reported William H. Lawrence, “denied categorically that [the atomic bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.”

Only one reporter, Wilfred Burchett, an Australian, had braved the perilous journey to Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing, in defiance of the Allied occupation authorities, which controlled the “press pack”.

“I write this as a warning to the world,” reported Burchett in the London Daily Express  of September 5,1945. Sitting in the rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter, he described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries who were dying from what he called “an atomic plague”.

For this, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared. His witness to the truth was never forgiven.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. It was justified by lies that form the bedrock of America’s war propaganda in the 21st century, casting a new enemy, and target – China.
During the 75 years since Hiroshima, the most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and to save lives.

“Even without the atomic bombing attacks,” concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, “air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. “Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that … Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war [against Japan] and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

The National Archives in Washington contains documented Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US made clear the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including “capitulation even if the terms were hard”. Nothing was done.

The US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US Air Force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. Stimson later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the [atomic] bomb”.

Stimson’s foreign policy colleagues — looking ahead to the post-war era they were then shaping “in our image”, as Cold War planner George Kennan famously put it — made clear they were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the [atomic] bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the atomic bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.”

The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Harry Truman voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success” of “the experiment”.

The “experiment” continued long after the war was over. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States exploded 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific: the equivalent of more than one Hiroshima every day for 12 years.

The human and environmental consequences were catastrophic. During the filming of my documentary, The Coming War on China, I chartered a small aircraft and flew to Bikini Atoll in the Marshalls. It was here that the United States exploded the world’s first Hydrogen Bomb. It remains poisoned earth. My shoes registered “unsafe” on my Geiger counter. Palm trees stood in unworldly formations. There were no birds.

I trekked through the jungle to the concrete bunker where, at 6.45 on the morning of March 1, 1954, the button was pushed. The sun, which had risen, rose again and vaporised an entire island in the lagoon, leaving a vast black hole, which from the air is a menacing spectacle: a deathly void in a place of beauty.

The radioactive fall-out spread quickly and “unexpectedly”. The official history claims “the wind changed suddenly”. It was the first of many lies, as declassified documents and the victims’ testimony reveal.

Gene Curbow, a meteorologist assigned to monitor the test site, said, “They knew where the radioactive fall-out was going to go. Even on the day of the shot, they still had an opportunity to evacuate people, but [people] were not evacuated; I was not evacuated… 
The United States needed some guinea pigs to study what the effects of radiation would do.”

Like Hiroshima, the secret of the Marshall Islands was a calculated experiment on the lives of large numbers of people. This was Project 4.1, which began as a scientific study of mice and became an experiment on “human beings exposed to the radiation of a nuclear weapon”.

The Marshall Islanders I met in 2015 — like the survivors of Hiroshima I interviewed in the 1960s and 70s — suffered from a range of cancers, commonly thyroid cancer; thousands had already died. Miscarriages and stillbirths were common; those babies who lived were often deformed horribly.

Unlike Bikini, nearby Rongelap atoll had not been evacuated during the H-Bomb test. Directly downwind of Bikini, Rongelap’s skies darkened and it rained what first appeared to be snowflakes.  Food and water were contaminated; and the population fell victim to cancers. That is still true today.

I met Nerje Joseph, who showed me a photograph of herself as a child on Rongelap. She had terrible facial burns and much of her was hair missing. “We were bathing at the well on the day the bomb exploded,” she said. “White dust started falling from the sky. I reached to catch the powder. We used it as soap to wash our hair. A few days later, my hair started falling out.”

Lemoyo Abon said, “Some of us were in agony. Others had diarrhoea. We were terrified. We thought it must be the end of the world.”

US official archive film I included in my film refers to the islanders as “amenable savages”. In the wake of the explosion, a US Atomic Energy Agency official is seen boasting that Rongelap “is by far the most contaminated place on earth”, adding, “it will be interesting to get a measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment.”

American scientists, including medical doctors, built distinguished careers studying the “human uptake’. There they are in flickering film, in their white coats, attentive with their clipboards. When an islander died in his teens, his family received a sympathy card from the scientist who studied him.

I have reported from five nuclear “ground zeros” throughout the world — in Japan, the Marshall Islands, Nevada, Polynesia and Maralinga in Australia. Even more than my experience as a war correspondent, this has taught me about the ruthlessness and immorality of great power: that is, imperial power, whose cynicism is the true enemy of humanity.

This struck me forcibly when I filmed at Taranaki Ground Zero at Maralinga in the Australian desert. In a dish-like crater was an obelisk on which was inscribed: “A British atomic weapon was test exploded here on 9 October 1957”. On the rim of the crater was this sign:

WARNING: RADIATION HAZARD 

Radiation levels for a few hundred metres
around this point may be above those considered
safe for permanent occupation.

For as far as the eye could see, and beyond, the ground was irradiated. Raw plutonium lay about, scattered like talcum powder: plutonium is so dangerous to humans that a third of a milligram gives a 50 per cent chance of cancer.

The only people who might have seen the sign were Indigenous Australians, for whom there was no warning. According to an official account, if they were lucky “they were shooed off like rabbits”.

Today, an unprecedented campaign of propaganda is shooing us all off like rabbits. We are not meant to question the daily torrent of anti-Chinese rhetoric, which is rapidly overtaking the torrent of anti-Russia rhetoric. Anything Chinese is bad, anathema, a threat: Wuhan …. Huawei. How confusing it is when “our” most reviled leader says so.

The current phase of this campaign began not with Trump but with Barack Obama, who in 2011 flew to Australia to declare the greatest build-up of US naval forces in the Asia-Pacific region since World War Two. Suddenly, China was a “threat”. This was nonsense, of course. What was threatened was America’s unchallenged psychopathic view of itself as the richest, the most successful, the most “indispensable” nation.

What was never in dispute was its prowess as a bully — with more than 30 members of the United Nations suffering American sanctions of some kind and a trail of the blood running through defenceless countries bombed, their governments overthrown, their  elections interfered with, their resources plundered.

Obama’s declaration became known as the “pivot to Asia”. One of its principal advocates was his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who, as WikiLeaks revealed, wanted to rename the Pacific Ocean “the American Sea”.

Whereas Clinton never concealed her warmongering, Obama was a maestro of marketing.”I state clearly and with conviction,” said the new president in 2009, “that America’s commitment is to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

Obama increased spending on nuclear warheads faster than any president since the end of the Cold War. A “usable” nuclear weapon was developed. Known as the B61 Model 12, it means, according to General James Cartwright, former vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that “going smaller [makes its use] more thinkable”.

The target is China. Today, more than 400 American military bases almost encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to South-East Asia, Japan and Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, as one US strategist told me, “the perfect noose”.

A study by the RAND Corporation – which, since Vietnam, has planned America’s wars – is 
entitled War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. Commissioned by the US Army, the authors evoke the infamous catch cry of its chief Cold War strategist, Herman Kahn – “thinking the unthinkable”. Kahn’s book, On Thermonuclear War, elaborated a plan for a “winnable” nuclear war.

Kahn’s apocalyptic view is shared by Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an evangelical fanatic who believes in the “rapture of the End”. He is perhaps the most dangerous man alive. “I was CIA director,” he boasted, “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses.”  Pompeo’s obsession is China.

The endgame of Pompeo’s extremism is rarely if ever discussed in the Anglo-American media, where the myths and fabrications about China are standard fare, as were the lies about Iraq. A virulent racism is the sub-text of this propaganda. Classified “yellow” even though they were white, the Chinese are the only ethnic group to have been banned by an “exclusion act” from entering the United States, because they were Chinese. Popular culture declared them sinister, untrustworthy, “sneaky”, depraved, diseased, immoral.

An Australian magazine, The Bulletin, was devoted to promoting fear of the “yellow peril” as if all of Asia was about to fall down on the whites-only colony by the force of gravity.

As the historian Martin Powers writes, acknowledging China’s  modernism, its secular morality and “contributions to liberal thought threatened European face, so it became necessary to suppress China’s role in the Enlightenment debate …. For centuries, China’s threat to the myth of Western superiority has made it an easy target for race-baiting.”

In the Sydney Morning Herald, tireless China-basher Peter Hartcher described those who spread Chinese influence in Australia as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows”. Hartcher, who favourably quotes the American demagogue Steve Bannon, likes to interpret the “dreams” of the current Chinese elite, to which he is apparently privy. These are inspired by yearnings for the “Mandate of Heaven” of 2,000 years ago. Ad nausea.

To combat this “mandate”, the Australian government of Scott Morrison has committed one of the most secure countries on earth, whose major trading partner is China, to hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American missiles that can be fired at China.

The trickledown is already evident. In a country historically scarred by violent racism towards Asians, Australians of Chinese descent have formed a vigilante group to protect delivery riders. Phone videos show a delivery rider punched in the face and a Chinese couple racially abused in a supermarket. Between April and June, there were almost 400 racist attacks on Asian-Australians.  

“We are not your enemy,” a high-ranking strategist in China told me, “but if you [in the West] decide we are, we must prepare without delay.” China’s arsenal is small compared with America’s, but it is growing fast, especially the development of maritime missiles designed to destroy fleets of ships.

“For the first time,” wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists, “China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack… This would be a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy…”

In Washington, I met Amitai Etzioni, distinguished professor of international affairs at George Washington University, who wrote that a “blinding attack on China” was planned, “with strikes that could be mistakenly perceived [by the Chinese] as pre-emptive attempts to take out its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into a terrible use-it-or-lose-it dilemma [that would] lead to nuclear war.”

In 2019, the US staged its biggest single military exercise since the Cold War, much of it in high secrecy. An armada of ships and long-range bombers rehearsed an “Air-Sea Battle Concept for China” – ASB – blocking sea lanes in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China’s access to oil, gas and other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

It is fear of such a blockade that has seen China develop its Belt and Road Initiative along the old Silk Road to Europe and urgently build strategic airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands.

In Shanghai, I met Lijia Zhang, a Beijing journalist and novelist, typical of a new class of outspoken mavericks. Her best-selling book has the ironic title Socialism Is Great! Having grown up in the chaotic, brutal Cultural Revolution, she has travelled and lived in the US and Europe. “Many Americans imagine,” she said, “that Chinese people live a miserable, repressed life with no freedom whatsoever. The [idea of] the yellow peril has never left them… They have no idea there are some 500 million people being lifted out of poverty, and some would say it’s 600 million.”

Modern China’s epic achievements, its defeat of mass poverty, and the pride and contentment of its people (measured forensically by American pollsters such as Pew) are wilfully unknown or misunderstood in the West. This alone is a commentary on the lamentable state of Western journalism and the abandonment of honest reporting.
China’s repressive dark side and what we like to call its “authoritarianism” are the facade we are allowed to see almost exclusively. It is as if we are fed unending tales of the evil super-villain Dr. Fu Manchu. And it is time we asked why: before it is too late to stop the next Hiroshima.

Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger - http://johnpilger.com/

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.

See also

Atomic Bombing at 75: Truman’s ‘Human Sacrifice’ to Subdue Moscow

In case you missed it: Hiroshima Cover-up: How the War Department's Timesman Won a Pulitzer

Click for Spanish, German, Dutch, Danish, French, translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load

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Zie ook:
'Hiroshima en Nagasaki 74 jaar later: tijd om eindelijk de bom te bannen en de VS agressie tegen Rusland te onderzoeken'

'Hiroshima, monument van VS agressie'

'Bijna 70 atoomtesten later: straling op Marshalleilanden hoger dan in Tsjernobyl' 

Voor meer VS terreur:
'VS vermoordde meer dan 20 miljoen mensen sinds het einde van WOII........' Tot het jaar 2000, deze eeuw zijn er intussen meer dan 2,5 miljoen moorden aan toe te voegen, moorden begaan door de VS en de NAVO (waar deze terreurorganisatie onder militair opperbevel stond en staat van de VS...)....

'VS buitenlandbeleid sinds WOII: een lange lijst van staatsgrepen en oorlogen..........'

'List of wars involving the United States'

'CIA 70 jaar: 70 jaar moorden, martelen, coups plegen, nazi's beschermen, media manipulatie enz. enz.........'

Voor meer berichten over Hiroshima en Nagasaki, klik op het betreffende label, direct onder dit bericht.

PS: hoorde vanmiddag op WDR dat Japan de grootste hoeveelheid plutonium ter wereld bezit en dat in een land dat overal onderhevig is aan aardbevingen........

VS bezig met optuigen van en oefenen op Wereldoorlog III........

Het volgende artikel van John Pilger vond ik op het blog van Stan van Houcke, die het van Global Research haalde. Hierin betoogt Pilger, dat de Derde Wereldoorlog al is begonnen, al is dit nu nog een propagandaoorlog met leugens en afleiding van uiterst dubieuze zaken, waarbij de reguliere media de slippendragers zijn van de neoliberale machthebbers.......

Pilger wijst op de VS dat een ongelofelijk aantal militaire- en raketbases (of basissen, zoals u wilt) over de wereld heeft en intussen Rusland en China omsingeld heeft met deze bases...... Ook de hypocriete leugens van Obama over het kernwapenvrij maken van de wereld, wordt grondig onderuit gehaald door Pilger.

Vandaar ook dat Pilger aandacht aan de VS presidentsverkiezingen schenkt en wijst op het gevaar dat Hillary Clinton als president zal vormen voor de 'wereldvrede........' Voorts wijst Pilger op de enorme budgetten aan belastinggeld, die het westen o.l.v. de VS uitgeven aan defensie, bijvoorbeeld Australië dat 195 miljard dollar aan defensie spendeert........... De VS en de NAVO landen geven jaarlijks alleen al 7 keer meer uit aan defensie, dan Rusland en China samen.........

A World War Has Begun. Break the Silence

This is an edited version of an address by John Pilger at the University of Sydney, entitled A World War Has Begun:

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 theObserver.

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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Herdenking van ontploffing waterstofbom op Marshall eilanden

Vandaag wordt op de Marshalleilanden herdacht, dat 60 jaar geleden, op 1 maart 1954, de VS op het Bikini atol, een zware waterstofbom tot ontploffing hebben gebracht. Duizenden mensen op omliggende eilanden (op fikse afstand), werden toen aan hoge dosis straling blootgesteld. Met alle bijzonder nare ziekten van dien, een zaak waar de VS nooit schadeloosstellingen voor betaalde............
Goed hè.............

Bron: BBC World Service.