World War III Has Begun; Break The Silence, By 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 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 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?
This is an edited
version of an address by John Pilger at the University of Sydney, entitled A
World War Has Begun.
