Information
Clearing House (ICH) bracht gisteren een artikel van John Pilger, een
Australische journalist en documentaire maker.
In zijn
schrijven waarschuwt Pilger voor een komende nucleaire wereldoorlog.
Met een aantal voorbeelden geeft Pilger aan hoe de VS zich voorbereid
op zo’n oorlog…….
Lees dit
(uitstekende) bericht en oordeel zelf (onder het artikel kan u
klikken voor een vertaling):
On
the Beach 2017: The Beckoning Of Nuclear War
By
John Pilger
The
US submarine captain says, “We’ve all got to die one day, some
sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you’re
never ready, because you don’t know when it’s coming. Well, now
we do know and there’s nothing to be done about it.”
He
says he will be dead by September. It will take about a week to die,
though no one can be sure. Animals live the longest.
The
war was over in a month. The United States, Russia and China were the
protagonists. It is not clear if it was started by accident or
mistake. There was no victor. The northern hemisphere is contaminated
and lifeless now.
A
curtain of radioactivity is moving south towards Australia and New
Zealand, southern Africa and South America. By September, the last
cities, towns and villages will succumb. As in the north, most
buildings will remain untouched, some illuminated by the last
flickers of electric light.
This
is the way the world ends
Not
with a bang but a whimper
These
lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem The
Hollow Men appear at
the beginning of Nevil Shute’s novel On
the Beach, which
left me close to tears. The endorsements on the cover said the same.
Published
in 1957 at the height of the Cold War when too many writers were
silent or cowed, it is a masterpiece. At first the language suggests
a genteel relic; yet nothing I have read on nuclear war is as
unyielding in its warning. No book is more urgent.
I
read On
the Beach for
the first time the other day, finishing it as the US Congress passed
a law to wage economic war on Russia, the world’s second most
lethal nuclear power. There was no justification for this
insane vote, except the promise of plunder.
The
“sanctions” are aimed at Europe, too, mainly Germany, which
depends on Russian natural gas and on European companies that do
legitimate business with Russia. In what passed for debate on Capitol
Hill, the more garrulous senators left no doubt that the embargo was
designed to force Europe to import expensive American gas.
Their
main aim seems to be war – real war. No provocation as extreme can
suggest anything else. They seem to crave it, even though Americans
have little idea what war is. The Civil War of 1861-5 was the last on
their mainland. War is what the United States does to others.
The
only nation to have used nuclear weapons against human beings, they
have since destroyed scores of governments, many of them democracies,
and laid to waste whole societies – the million deaths in Iraq were
a fraction of the carnage in Indo-China, which President Reagan
called “a noble cause” and President Obama revised as the tragedy
of an “exceptional people”He was not referring to the Vietnamese.
Filming
last year at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, I overheard a
National Parks Service guide lecturing a school party of young
teenagers. “Listen up,” he said. “We lost 58,000 young soldiers
in Vietnam, and they died defending your
freedom.”
At
a stroke, the truth was inverted. No freedom was defended. Freedom
was destroyed. A peasant country was invaded and millions of its
people were killed, maimed, dispossessed, poisoned; 60,000 of the
invaders took their own lives. Listen up, indeed.
A
lobotomy is performed on each generation. Facts are removed. History
is excised and replaced by what Time magazine
calls “an eternal present”. Harold Pinter described this as
“manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for
universal good, a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of
hypnosis [which meant] that it never happened. Nothing ever happened.
Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t
matter. It was of no interest.”
Those
who call themselves liberals or tendentiously “the left” are
eager participants in this manipulation, and its brainwashing, which
today revert to one name: Trump.
While
they pursue their fossilised anti-Russia agendas, narcissistic media
such as the Washington
Post,
the BBC and the Guardian suppress
the essence of the most important political story of our time as they
warmonger on a scale I cannot remember in my lifetime.
On
3 August, in contrast to the acreage the Guardian has
given to drivel that the Russians conspired with Trump (reminiscent
of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a “Soviet agent”),
the paper buried, on page 16, news that the President of the United
States was forced to sign a Congressional bill declaring economic war
on Russia.
Unlike
every other Trump signing, this was conducted in virtual secrecy and
attached with a caveat from Trump himself that it was “clearly
unconstitutional”.
A
coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not
because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently
made clear he does not want war with Russia.
This
glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the “national
security” managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance,
armaments, threats and extreme capitalism. Martin Luther King called
them “the greatest purveyors of violence in the world today”.
They
have encircled Russia and China with missiles and a nuclear arsenal.
They have used neo-Nazis to instal an unstable, aggressive regime on
Russia’s “borderland” – the way through which Hitler invaded,
causing the deaths of 27 million people. Their goal is to
dismember the modern Russian Federation.
The
threat is simultaneous. Russia is first, China is next. The US has
just completed a huge military exercise with Australia known as
Talisman Sabre. They rehearsed a blockade of the Malacca Straits and
the South China Sea, through which pass China’s economic lifelines.
The
admiral commanding the US Pacific fleet said that, “if required”,
he would nuke China. That he would say such a thing publicly in the
current perfidious atmosphere begins to make fact of Nevil Shute’s
fiction.
None
of this is considered news. No connection is made as the bloodfest of
Passchendaele a century ago is remembered. Honest reporting is no
longer welcome in much of the media. Windbags, known as pundits,
dominate: editors are infotainment or party line managers. Where
there was once sub-editing, there is the liberation of axe-grinding
clichés. Those journalists who do not comply are defenestrated.
At
the height of the Cold War, the anti-communist hysteria in the United
States was such that US officials who were on official business in
China were accused of treason and sacked. In 1957 – the year Shute
wrote On
the Beach –
no official in the State Department could speak the language of the
world’s most populous nation. Mandarin speakers were purged under
strictures now echoed in the Congressional bill that has just passed,
aimed at Russia.
The
bill was bipartisan. There is no fundamental difference between
Democrats and Republicans. The terms “left” and “right” are
meaningless. Most of America’s modern wars were started not
by conservatives, but by liberal Democrats.
When
Obama left office, he presided over a record seven wars, including
America’s longest war and an unprecedented campaign of
extrajudicial killings – murder – by drones.
In
his last year, according to a Council on Foreign Relations study,
Obama, the “reluctant liberal warrior”, dropped 26,171 bombs –
three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day. Having pledged to help
“rid the world” of nuclear weapons, the Nobel Peace Laureate
built more nuclear warheads than any president since the Cold War.
Trump
is a wimp by comparison. It was Obama – with his secretary of
state Hillary Clinton at his side – who destroyed Libya as a modern
state and launched the human stampede to Europe. At home, immigration
groups knew him as the “deporter-in-chief”.
One
of Obama’s last acts as president was to sign a bill that handed a
record $618billion to the Pentagon, reflecting the soaring ascendancy
of fascist militarism in the governance of the United States. Trump
has endorsed this.
Buried
in the detail was the establishment of a “Center for Information
Analysis and Response”. This is a ministry of truth. It is tasked
with providing an “official narrative of facts” that will prepare
us for the real possibility of nuclear war – if we allow it.
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On the Beach 2017: The Beckoning Of Nuclear War
