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The Divine Land

Hold your nose and vote for Clinton – everything is better than Trump. It seems to be the widely accepted attitude in much of the American media landscape. The truth is that Clinton is going to continue a steady course toward a very dangerous world.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

When I arrive in the United States this election year, I am turned off by the silence. I've covered four presidential campaigns, the first in 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot during the election campaign, and I saw the assailant trying to kill him. It became a kind of American baptism – especially in combination with the Chicago police's eagerness for violence during the Democratic Party conference. The great counter-revolution had begun.

Martin Luther King, the first to be assassinated that year, had been bold enough to link the suffering of African Americans to the fate of the Vietnamese people. When Janis Joplin sang "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," she may have spoken unconsciously on behalf of millions of victims of the United States in distant lands.

"We lost 58 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died to defend your freedom. We must never forget that. " This was said by a guide from the National Parks Service when I filmed at the Lincoln Monument in Washington last week. He talked to a group of schoolchildren in their teens wearing bright orange t-shirts. He served the phrase as on rams – a phrase that turned the truth about Vietnam upside down – and as if it were an established and unchallenged truth rather than a outright lie.

Those millions of Vietnamese who died were maimed, poisoned and deprived of everything they owned as a result of the American invasion. This should therefore have no place in the young people's historical consciousness. Not to mention the around 60 veterans who took their own lives. A friend of mine in the Navy who was paralyzed from the neck down in Vietnam was often asked, "On which side did you fight?"

A few years ago, I went to an exhibition called "The Price of Freedom" at the United States' venerable National Museum Smithsonian Institution in Washington. It was a very popular exhibition. The long ranks of ordinary people, most of them children, were served several lies: the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved "a million human lives", and Iraq was "released through air strikes with unprecedented precision". The basic tone was oblique and bombastic: Only Americans pay the price of freedom.

It is not only Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders who make the 2016 election campaign remarkable. Noteworthy is also the tenacious story of a bloodthirsty and self-proclaimed divinity. One third of the UN member states have been trampled on by the US – with toppled governments, broken democracies, imposed blockades and boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible for this have been liberals – Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton and Obama.

This systematic violence is so nicely described in public, said Blessed Harold Pinter when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature: "It never happened. Nothing happened. Even when it happened, it did not happen. It did not matter. It was not of interest ».

Pinter expressed an acidic admiration for what he called "a rather clinical manipulation of world power, disguised as good powers for the common good." It's an excellent, cunning and successful form of hypnosis. ”

Look at Obama, for example. He is preparing for his departure, and the make-up is again in full swing. Obama is "cool". He has been one of the most violent presidents, giving free rein to the Pentagon's war machine he inherited from his notorious predecessor. He has appealed to more whistleblowers than any other president before him. He pleaded guilty to Chelsea Manning before the trial. At the time of writing, Obama is running a worldwide, unique campaign of terrorism and drone killings.

The millions of Vietnamese who died were mutilated, poisoned and deprived of everything they owned as a result of the US invasion.

James Bradley, author of the bestselling Flags of Our Fathers and the son of one of the US Marines who raised the American flag to the top on Iwo Jima, stated the following: “A myth that is now unfolding is that Obama is a peace-loving type trying to make the world free of nuclear weapons. The truth is that he is the greatest nuclear warrior to be found. He has tied us to a destructive line where we spend thousands of dollars on multiple nuclear weapons. In a way, people live in a kind of fantasy that both his vague press conferences and his speeches, as well as the arranged feel-good photo stunts he puts on, are related to the politics he actually leads. That is by no means the case. "

The second Cold War is at issue – with Obama's blessing. The Russian president is a "fake villain". The Chinese have not yet been portrayed as insidious types with hair whips, as they were caricatured when all Chinese were banned from the United States – but the media warriors are working on the matter.

Neither Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders has mentioned some of these things. There is no risk or danger to either the United States or any of us. It is as if the greatest military reconstruction at the Russian borders since World War II has not happened. On May 11, Romania went "live" with a NATO "missile defense base" aiming its first US missiles at the heart of Russia, the world's second-largest nuclear power.

The Pentagon sends ships, planes and special forces to the Philippines to threaten China. The United States has already surrounded China with hundreds of military bases going in an arc from Australia to Asia and through Afghanistan. Obama calls this a "turnaround."

As a direct consequence, China has now changed its nuclear weapons policy no-first-use to high readiness, and put submarines with nuclear weapons at sea. Things taper off.

Clinton, the "woman candidate," leaves behind a trail of bloody bargains: in Honduras, Libya (in addition to the assassination of the Libyan president) and Ukraine. Clinton's presidential campaign receives money from everyone – with the exception of one – the world's ten largest weapons companies. No other candidate is close to this.

Sanders – the hope of many young Americans – is not so different from Clinton when it comes to views of the world outside the United States. He supported Bill Clinton's illegal bombing of Serbia. He supported Obama's drone terror, the provocations against Russia and new special forces (death squads) to Iraq. He has nothing to say about the threats to China and the growing risk of nuclear war. He agrees that Edward Snowden should be brought to justice, and he calls Hugo Chavez – a Social Democrat like himself – "a dead communist dictator". He promises to support Clinton if she is nominated.

«The choice» between Trump or Clinton is an illusion and in reality no choice – rather it stands between two sides of the same issue. By using minorities as scapegoats and promising to "make America great again," Trump is a right-wing domestic populist, while Clinton may be more damaging to the world.

The hysteria of Trump in the more leftist media helps maintain the illusion of "free and open debate" and "practicing democracy".

"Donald Trump is the only one who has said anything meaningful and critical about US foreign policy," writes Stephan Cohen, professor of Russian history emeritus at Princeton University and New York University, and one of the few Russia experts in the United States who takes the leaf out of his mouth when applies to the risk of war. In a radio show, Cohen referred to critical questions Trump has been traveling alone – including: Why is the United States "across the globe"? What is NATO's real mission? Why is the US always trying to achieve regime change in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Ukraine? Why does Washington treat Russia and Vladimir Putin as an enemy?

The hysteria of Trump in the more leftist media helps maintain the illusion of "free and open debate" and "practicing democracy". Trump has a grotesque view of immigrants and Muslims, but the very boss of deporting vulnerable people out of the United States is Obama, not Trump. Obama's betrayal of colored people becomes his legacy – as the custody of a largely black prison population now larger than Stalin's Gulag.

This presidential campaign may not be about populism, but about American liberalism, an ideology that considers itself modern and thus superior – the only proper way. The right wing of this ideology has similarities to 1800th century Christian imperialists, with their godly duty to repent or conquer others.

In the United Kingdom this goes by the name "blairism". Christian war criminal Tony Blair escaped with his secret preparations for the Iraq invasion because the liberal political class and media fell for his "cool britannia". In The Guardian newspaper, the applause was almost deafening, and he was referred to as "mysterious". A diversion man better known by the name identity politics – otherwise imported from the United States – worked steadily under his rule.

History was declared as above, class was abolished and gender was promoted as feminism in itself; many women became New Labor MPs. On the first day in Parliament, they voted to cut support for single parents, most of them women. A majority voted for an invasion that led to 700 Iraqi widows.

We look similarly trend in the United States, represented here by the politically correct warlords of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the major broadcasters that dominate the political debate. I saw a heated debate on CNN about Trump's infidelity. It was obvious, it was claimed, that one could not trust such a man in the White House! No real problems were raised. Nothing about the 80 percent of Americans whose incomes have slumped down to the 1970s level. Nothing about escalating to war. The widely accepted truth seems to be to stick to the nose and vote for Clinton – anything but Trump works. That way they can get rid of the monster and maintain a system that is eager for a new war.

This text was first published on johnpilger. com

 

pilger@nytid.no
pilger@nytid.no
Pilger is an award-winning journalist and author with a number of honorary doctorates from universities around the world.

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