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.
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.
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.
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
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