(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
I've been filming in the Marshall Islands in the middle of the Pacific. When I tell people where I have been, they ask, "Where is it?" If I give them a hint by saying "Bikini," they respond, "You mean swimwear?"
Few seem to be aware that the bikini got its name as a tribute to the nuclear explosions that destroyed the Bikini Toll, which belongs to the Marshall Islands. 66 nuclear units were released by the United States over the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958. That equates to 1,6 hiroshima bombs every day for 12 years.
The bikini toll is a quiet place today, mutated and polluted. The palm trees grow in a strange line formation. Nothing is moving. There are no birds there. The tombstones of the old cemetery are alive with radioactivity. My shoes looked like "unsafe" on a geiger counter.
I stood on the beach and saw the emerald green of the Pacific clear away to a huge, black hole. It was the crater hydrogen bomb "Bravo" left behind. This explosion poisoned people and their surroundings for hundreds of kilometers, possibly forever.
On the return trip I landed at Honolulu Airport and noticed an American magazine called Women's Health. On the front stood a smiling woman in a bikini, and the headline said "You can also get a bikini body". A few days earlier I had interviewed women who had completely different forms of "bikini bodies": Everyone had had thyroid cancer or other life-threatening cancers.
Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all these women were poor. They were the victims of a Greek superpower that is more dangerous today than ever.
I use this experience as a warning, and to put an end to a diversion that has swallowed many of us. Edward Bernays, the founder of modern propaganda, described this phenomenon as "a deliberate and intelligent manipulation of habits and opinions" in democratic societies. He called it an "invisible government".
How many people are aware that a world war has begun? Currently, there is a war of propaganda, lies and distractions, but this can change abruptly with the first erroneous command, the first rocket.
In 2009, US President Obama stood in front of an admiring crowd in downtown Prague, in the heart of Europe. He promised to "make the world nuclear-free". People cheered, some cried. A wave of banalities in all media followed. Obama was then awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Everything was fake. He lied.
The Obama administration has created more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems and more nuclear factories. The cost of nuclear warheads rose more under Obama than under any other US president. Expenditure for the last 30 years is over one trillion dollars.
A mini-atom bomb is being planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. The world has never seen anything like it. General James Cartwright, former deputy chairman of the Military Command – a council of top US military officials – said that "making the atomic bombs smaller makes them more likely to be used."
The last one and a half This year we have seen the largest build-up of military forces since World War II. This operation takes place under the auspices of the United States, and takes place along Russia's western borders. Foreign troops have not posed such a demonstrative threat to Russia since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Ukraine – once part of the Soviet Union – has become a CIA theme park. After orchestrating a coup in Kiev, Washington controls a regime that is neighboring and hostile to Russia – a regime that is rotten by the Nazis, literally. High-ranking parliamentary figures in Ukraine are political descendants of notorious fascists from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Rebel Army. They openly praise Hitler and want persecution and expulsion of the Russian-speaking minority.
This is rarely news in the West, and if it first reaches the media, it is twisted to suppress the truth.
In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – neighboring Russia – the United States is deploying troops, tanks and heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world's second largest nuclear power is met with silence in the West.
What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is that there is a parallel campaign against China.
It rarely goes a day without China gaining the status of "threat". According to Admiral Harry Harris, who is the US commander in the Pacific, China is now building a "Chinese wall of sand in the South China Sea".
What he believes is that China is building airstrips on the Spratly Islands, which are the subject of a conflict with the Philippines – a conflict that had no 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? That means freedom for American warships to patrol and dominate China's coastal waters. We can try to imagine the American reaction if Chinese warships had done the same off the coast of California.
In a movie I made, The War You Do Not See, I interviewed renowned journalists in the US and UK – reporters such as Dan Rather from the American broadcasting company CBS, Rageh Omar from the British BBC and David Rose from the newspaper The Observer.
Everyone said that if journalists and broadcasters had done their job – thus questioning the propaganda surrounding Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction rather than reproducing and reinforcing the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair – the invasion of Iraq in 2003 might not have taken place. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were still alive today.
The propaganda that is the basis of a war against Russia or China is in principle similar to the propaganda that was the basis of the war in Iraq. From what I know, there are no journalists in the western mainstream media asking why China makes airstrips in the South China Sea.
The answer to this should be obvious anyway. The United States surrounds China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups and nuclear-armed bombers.
This life-threatening arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific Ocean – the Mariana Islands, the Marshall Islands and Guam – to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and through Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a loop around China. This does not reach the news.
The immersion of the media is the warfare of the media.
In 2015, under strict discretion, the United States and Australia staged the largest single military exercise in the air and at sea in recent history, known as the "Talisman Saber". The goal was to practice on one Air-Sea Battle Plan, blocking sea lanes such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Strait, which cut off China's access to oil, gas and other important raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.
In the circus, also known as the US presidential campaign, Donald Trump is portrayed as a madman and a fascist. He is definitely disgusting – but he is also a hate figure in the media. This in itself should be enough to make us skeptical.
Trump's view of migration is grotesque, but no more grotesque than David Cameron's view. It is not Trump who is the "great deportee" from the United States – it is the peace prize winner Barack Obama.
According to a hugely liberal commentator, "Trump unleashes the dark forces of violence" in the United States. Release them?
This is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police are waging an aggressive war against African Americans. This is the country that has attacked and tried to overthrow more than 50 governments – many of them democratic – and has bombed from East Asia to the Middle East, causing death and poverty for millions of people.
There is no other country that can compete with this systematic violence. Most of America's wars (almost all against defenseless countries) have not been started by Republican presidents, but by Liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.
In 1947, a series of directives from the US National Security Council described the overarching goal of US foreign policy: "A world has changed dramatically in the US image." The ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans. Or not: Heretics must be converted, undermined, bribed, blackened or crushed.
Self-obsession became the new spirit of the times in Western societies, and heralded the downfall of strong, collective movements against war, social injustice, racism and gender discrimination.
Donald Trump is a symptom of all this, but he also appears unorthodox. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime and he does not want to go to war against Russia and China. The danger to us all is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. Clinton is not an independent politician. She represents the tenacity and violence of an arrogant system that attributes to itself a special position in the world – a totalitarian system with a random liberal face.
Now that the presidential election is approaching, Clinton is being hailed as the first female president, regardless of crimes and lies – just as Barack Obama was hailed as the first black president, and the Liberals bought all his nonsense about "hope". And this continues.
Accompanied by Guardian columnist Owen Jones' description as "funny, charming and with a coolness that surpasses all other politicians", Obama recently sent out drones to slaughter 150 people in Somalia. He usually kills people on Tuesdays, where he – according to the New York Times – gets a list of candidates who are relevant for drone attacks. So cool.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton threatened to "annihilate" Iran with nuclear weapons. As Secretary of State under Obama, she was involved in governing the Democratic government in Honduras. Her contribution to the destruction of Libya in 2011 was almost cheerful. When Libyan General Gaddafi was publicly sodomized with a knife – a murder made possible by American logistics – an elated Clinton said, "We came, we saw, he died."
One of Clinton's closest allies is former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who has criticized young women for not supporting "Hillary." This is the same Madeleine Albright who stated on television that half a million dead Iraqi children were "worth it".
Among Clinton's biggest supporters, we have the Israeli lobby and 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 as a women's candidate to stand up to the evil Trump, the official demon. Among her supporters we find several renowned feminists, including Gloria Steinem in the United States and Anne Summers in Australia.
A generation ago, there was a postmodern cult now known as "identity politics", which prevented many intelligent, far-sighted people from investigating the cases and the people they supported – such as the Obama and Clinton forgery, and quasi-progressive movements like Syriza in Greece – who betrayed the people of the land and allied themselves with their enemies.
Self-obsession, a form of "meg-ism," became the new spirit of the day in privileged Western societies, heralding the downfall of strong, collective movements against war, social injustice, inequality, racism, and gender discrimination.
Today it may seem that the long hibernation is possibly over. The young people are moving again. Gradually. The thousands of people in Britain who supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labor leader are part of this awakening. The same goes for those who rallied to support Senator Bernie Sanders.
In the UK last This week, Jeremy Corbyn's closest ally, the shadow treasurer John McDonnell, ordered the Labor government to pay the debt to the pirate banks and, in practice, to continue the so-called austerity policy.
In the US, Bernie Sanders has promised to support Clinton if – or when – she is nominated. He has also expressed support for the US use of force against land in cases where he thinks it is "correct". He says Obama has done a "great job."
America has hung a loop around China. This does not reach the news.
In Australia, there is a kind of "funeral policy", where tedious parliamentary exercises are played out in the media, while refugees and indigenous peoples are persecuted and inequality grows, while there is a smoldering danger of war. Malcolm Turnbull's Australian government has just announced a so-called defense budget of 195 billion dollars, which is a driving force for war. There was never any debate about this. Just silence.
What has happened to the tradition of direct popular action, liberated from political parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment needed to start the long journey towards a better, fairer and more peaceful world? Where are the free thinkers in art, film, theater and in literature?
Where are those who are going to break the silence? Do we have to wait until the first nuclear missile is fired?
The text is an abridged version of a speech given by John Pilger at the University of Sydney under the title "A World War Has Begun".
See www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/23/a-world-war-has-begun-break-the-silence/
www.johnpilger.com
