ATOMIC BOMBINGS AT 75: John Pilger - Another Hiroshima is Coming - Unless We
Stop It Now
August 3, 2020
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of premeditated mass murder unleashing a
weapon of intrinsic criminality. It was justified by lies that form the
bedrock of 21st century U.S. war propaganda, casting a new enemy, and target
- China.
By John Pilger
in Sydney, Australia
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still
there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs
splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to
open.
At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her
silhouette were burned into the granite.
I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then I walked down to the river
where the survivors still lived in shanties.
I met a man called Yukio, whose chest was etched with the pattern of the
shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an
electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell.
"I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were
left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people
naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain
I was dead."
Nine years later, I returned to look for him and he was dead from leukemia.
"No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin" said a New York Times headline on
September 13, 1945, a classic of planted disinformation. "General Farrell,"
reported William H. Lawrence, "denied categorically that [the atomic bomb]
produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity." Lawrence received the
Pulitzer Prize.
Only one reporter, Wilfred Burchett, an Australian, had braved the perilous
journey to Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing, in
defiance of the Allied occupation authorities, which controlled the "press
pack".
Wilfred Burchett (YouTube)
"I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the London
Daily Express of September 5,1945. Sitting in the rubble with his Baby
Hermes typewriter, he described hospital wards filled with people with no
visible injuries who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague".
For this, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and
smeared. His witness to the truth was never forgiven.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of premeditated mass
murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. It was justified by
lies that form the bedrock of America's war propaganda in the 21st century,
casting a new enemy, and target - China.
During the 75 years since Hiroshima, the most enduring lie is that the
atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and to save lives.
"Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States
Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have
exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and
obviate the need for invasion. "Based on a detailed investigation of all the
facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders
involved, it is the Survey's opinion that . Japan would have surrendered
even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not
entered the war [against Japan] and even if no invasion had been planned or
contemplated."
The National Archives in Washington contains documented Japanese peace
overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by
the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the U.S. made clear the
Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if
the terms were hard". Nothing was done.
The U.S. Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was
"fearful" that the U.S. Air Force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the
new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". Stimson later admitted
that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve
surrender merely in order not to have to use the [atomic] bomb".
Stimson's foreign policy colleagues - looking ahead to the post-war era they
were then shaping "in our image", as Cold War planner George Kennan famously
put it - made clear they were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the
[atomic] bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves,
director of the Manhattan Project that made the atomic bomb, testified:
"There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that
the project was conducted on that basis."
The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Harry Truman voiced his
satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".
The "experiment" continued long after the war was over. Between 1946 and
1958, the United States exploded 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands in
the Pacific: the equivalent of more than one Hiroshima every day for 12
years.
The human and environmental consequences were catastrophic. During the
filming of my documentary, The Coming War on China, I chartered a small
aircraft and flew to Bikini Atoll in the Marshalls. It was here that the
United States exploded the world's first Hydrogen Bomb. It remains poisoned
earth. My shoes registered "unsafe" on my Geiger counter. Palm trees stood
in unworldly formations. There were no birds.
Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test Site Marshall Islands. (UNESCO)
I trekked through the jungle to the concrete bunker where, at 6.45 on the
morning of March 1, 1954, the button was pushed. The sun, which had risen,
rose again and vaporised an entire island in the lagoon, leaving a vast
black hole, which from the air is a menacing spectacle: a deathly void in a
place of beauty.
The radioactive fall-out spread quickly and "unexpectedly". The official
history claims "the wind changed suddenly". It was the first of many lies,
as declassified documents and the victims' testimony reveal.
Gene Curbow, a meteorologist assigned to monitor the test site, said, "They
knew where the radioactive fall-out was going to go. Even on the day of the
shot, they still had an opportunity to evacuate people, but [people] were
not evacuated; I was not evacuated. The United States needed some guinea
pigs to study what the effects of radiation would do."
Marshall Islander Nerje Joseph with a photograph of her as a child soon
after the H-Bomb exploded on March 1, 1954
Like Hiroshima, the secret of the Marshall Islands was a calculated
experiment on the lives of large numbers of people. This was Project 4.1,
which began as a scientific study of mice and became an experiment on "human
beings exposed to the radiation of a nuclear weapon".
The Marshall Islanders I met in 2015 - like the survivors of Hiroshima I
interviewed in the 1960s and 70s - suffered from a range of cancers,
commonly thyroid cancer; thousands had already died. Miscarriages and
stillbirths were common; those babies who lived were often deformed
horribly.
Unlike Bikini, nearby Rongelap atoll had not been evacuated during the
H-Bomb test. Directly downwind of Bikini, Rongelap's skies darkened and it
rained what first appeared to be snowflakes. Food and water were
contaminated; and the population fell victim to cancers. That is still true
today.
I met Nerje Joseph, who showed me a photograph of herself as a child on
Rongelap. She had terrible facial burns and much of her was hair missing.
"We were bathing at the well on the day the bomb exploded," she said. "White
dust started falling from the sky. I reached to catch the powder. We used it
as soap to wash our hair. A few days later, my hair started falling out."
Lemoyo Abon said, "Some of us were in agony. Others had diarrhoea. We were
terrified. We thought it must be the end of the world."
U.S. official archive film I included in my film refers to the islanders as
"amenable savages". In the wake of the explosion, a U.S. Atomic Energy
Agency official is seen boasting that Rongelap "is by far the most
contaminated place on earth", adding, "it will be interesting to get a
measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment."
American scientists, including medical doctors, built distinguished careers
studying the "human uptake". There they are in flickering film, in their
white coats, attentive with their clipboards. When an islander died in his
teens, his family received a sympathy card from the scientist who studied
him.
"Baker Shot", part of Operation Crossroads, a U.S. nuclear test at Bikini
Atoll in 1946. (U.S. Defense Dept.)
I have reported from five nuclear "ground zeros" throughout the world - in
Japan, the Marshall Islands, Nevada, Polynesia and Maralinga in Australia.
Even more than my experience as a war correspondent, this has taught me
about the ruthlessness and immorality of great power: that is, imperial
power, whose cynicism is the true enemy of humanity.
This struck me forcibly when I filmed at Taranaki Ground Zero at Maralinga
in the Australian desert. In a dish-like crater was an obelisk on which was
inscribed: "A British atomic weapon was test exploded here on 9 October
1957". On the rim of the crater was this sign:
WARNING: RADIATION HAZARD
Radiation levels for a few hundred metres
around this point may be above those considered
safe for permanent occupation.
For as far as the eye could see, and beyond, the ground was irradiated. Raw
plutonium lay about, scattered like talcum powder: plutonium is so dangerous
to humans that a third of a milligram gives a 50 percent chance of cancer.
The only people who might have seen the sign were Indigenous Australians,
for whom there was no warning. According to an official account, if they
were lucky "they were shooed off like rabbits".
The Enduring Menace
Today, an unprecedented campaign of propaganda is shooing us all off like
rabbits. We are not meant to question the daily torrent of anti-Chinese
rhetoric, which is rapidly overtaking the torrent of anti-Russia rhetoric.
Anything Chinese is bad, anathema, a threat: Wuhan .. Huawei. How confusing
it is when "our" most reviled leader says so.
The current phase of this campaign began not with Trump but with Barack
Obama, who in 2011 flew to Australia to declare the greatest build-up of
U.S. naval forces in the Asia-Pacific region since World War Two. Suddenly,
China was a "threat". This was nonsense, of course. What was threatened was
America's unchallenged psychopathic view of itself as the richest, the most
successful, the most "indispensable" nation.
What was never in dispute was its prowess as a bully - with more than 30
members of the United Nations suffering American sanctions of some kind and
a trail of the blood running through defenceless countries bombed, their
governments overthrown, their elections interfered with, their resources
plundered.
Obama's declaration became known as the "pivot to Asia". One of its
principal advocates was his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who, as
WikiLeaks revealed, wanted to rename the Pacific Ocean "the American Sea".
Whereas Clinton never concealed her warmongering, Obama was a maestro of
marketing. "I state clearly and with conviction," said the new president in
2009, "that America's commitment is to seek the peace and security of a
world without nuclear weapons."
Obama speaks about 60 years of the U.S.-Australian alliance in Darwin,
Australia, Nov. 17, 2011. (Sgt. Pete Thibodeau/Wikimedia Commons)
Obama increased spending on nuclear warheads faster than any president since
the end of the Cold War. A "usable" nuclear weapon was developed. Known as
the B61 Model 12, it means, according to General James Cartwright, former
vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that "going smaller [makes its use]
more thinkable".
The target is China. Today, more than 400 American military bases almost
encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and nuclear weapons. From
Australia north through the Pacific to South-East Asia, Japan and Korea and
across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, as one U.S.
strategist told me, "the perfect noose".
The Unthinkable
A study by the RAND Corporation - which, since Vietnam, has planned
America's wars - is entitled War with China: Thinking Through the
Unthinkable. Commissioned by the U.S. Army, the authors evoke the infamous
catch cry of its chief Cold War strategist, Herman Kahn - "thinking the
unthinkable". Kahn's book, On Thermonuclear War, elaborated a plan for a
"winnable" nuclear war.
Kahn's apocalyptic view is shared by Trump's Secretary of State Mike Pompeo,
an evangelical fanatic who believes in the "rapture of the End". He is
perhaps the most dangerous man alive. "I was CIA director," he boasted, "We
lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses."
Pompeo's obsession is China.
The endgame of Pompeo's extremism is rarely if ever discussed in the
Anglo-American media, where the myths and fabrications about China are
standard fare, as were the lies about Iraq. A virulent racism is the
sub-text of this propaganda. Classified "yellow" even though they were
white, the Chinese are the only ethnic group to have been banned by an
"exclusion act" from entering the United States, because they were Chinese.
Popular culture declared them sinister, untrustworthy, "sneaky", depraved,
diseased, immoral.
An Australian magazine, The Bulletin, was devoted to promoting fear of the
"yellow peril" as if all of Asia was about to fall down on the whites-only
colony by the force of gravity.
'The Chinese Octopus', The Bulletin, Sydney 1886, an early promoter of the
"Yellow Peril" and other stereotypes.
As the historian Martin Powers writes, acknowledging China's modernism, its
secular morality and "contributions to liberal thought threatened European
face, so it became necessary to suppress China's role in the Enlightenment
debate .. For centuries, China's threat to the myth of Western superiority
has made it an easy target for race-baiting."
In the Sydney Morning Herald, tireless China-basher Peter Hartcher described
those who spread Chinese influence in Australia as "rats, flies, mosquitoes
and sparrows". Hartcher, who favourably quotes the American demagogue Steve
Bannon, likes to interpret the "dreams" of the current Chinese elite, to
which he is apparently privy. These are inspired by yearnings for the
"Mandate of Heaven" of 2,000 years ago. Ad nausea.
To combat this "mandate", the Australian government of Scott Morrison has
committed one of the most secure countries on earth, whose major trading
partner is China, to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of American
missiles that can be fired at China.
The trickledown is already evident. In a country historically scarred by
violent racism towards Asians, Australians of Chinese descent have formed a
vigilante group to protect delivery riders. Phone videos show a delivery
rider punched in the face and a Chinese couple racially abused in a
supermarket. Between April and June, there were almost 400 racist attacks on
Asian-Australians.
"We are not your enemy," a high-ranking strategist in China told me, "but if
you [in the West] decide we are, we must prepare without delay." China's
arsenal is small compared with America's, but it is growing fast, especially
the development of maritime missiles designed to destroy fleets of ships.
"For the first time," wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned
Scientists, "China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert
so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack. This would be
a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy."
In Washington, I met Amitai Etzioni, distinguished professor of
international affairs at George Washington University, who wrote that a
"blinding attack on China" was planned, "with strikes that could be
mistakenly perceived [by the Chinese] as pre-emptive attempts to take out
its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into a terrible use-it-or-lose-it
dilemma [that would] lead to nuclear war."
In 2019, the U.S. staged its biggest single military exercise since the Cold
War, much of it in high secrecy. An armada of ships and long-range bombers
rehearsed an "Air-Sea Battle Concept for China" - ASB - blocking sea lanes
in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China's access to oil, gas and
other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.
It is fear of such a blockade that has seen China develop its Belt and Road
Initiative along the old Silk Road to Europe and urgently build strategic
airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands.
In Shanghai, I met Lijia Zhang, a Beijing journalist and novelist, typical
of a new class of outspoken mavericks. Her best-selling book has the ironic
title Socialism Is Great! Having grown up in the chaotic, brutal Cultural
Revolution, she has travelled and lived in the U.S. and Europe. "Many
Americans imagine," she said, "that Chinese people live a miserable,
repressed life with no freedom whatsoever. The [idea of] the yellow peril
has never left them. They have no idea there are some 500 million people
being lifted out of poverty, and some would say it's 600 million."
Modern China's epic achievements, its defeat of mass poverty, and the pride
and contentment of its people (measured forensically by American pollsters
such as Pew) are wilfully unknown or misunderstood in the West. This alone
is a commentary on the lamentable state of Western journalism and the
abandonment of honest reporting.
China's repressive dark side and what we like to call its "authoritarianism"
are the facade we are allowed to see almost exclusively. It is as if we are
fed unending tales of the evil super-villain Dr. Fu Manchu. And it is time
we asked why: before it is too late to stop the next Hiroshima.
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ATOMIC BOMBINGS AT 75: John Pilger - Another Hiroshima is Coming - Unless We
Stop It Now
August 3, 2020
Save
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of premeditated mass murder unleashing a
weapon of intrinsic criminality. It was justified by lies that form the
bedrock of 21st century U.S. war propaganda, casting a new enemy, and target
- China.
By John Pilger
in Sydney, Australia
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still
there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs
splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to
open.
At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her
silhouette were burned into the granite.
I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then I walked down to the river
where the survivors still lived in shanties.
I met a man called Yukio, whose chest was etched with the pattern of the
shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an
electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell.
"I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were
left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people
naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain
I was dead."
Nine years later, I returned to look for him and he was dead from leukemia.
"No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin" said a New York Times headline on
September 13, 1945, a classic of planted disinformation. "General Farrell,"
reported William H. Lawrence, "denied categorically that [the atomic bomb]
produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity." Lawrence received the
Pulitzer Prize.
Only one reporter, Wilfred Burchett, an Australian, had braved the perilous
journey to Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing, in
defiance of the Allied occupation authorities, which controlled the "press
pack".
Wilfred Burchett (YouTube)
"I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the London
Daily Express of September 5,1945. Sitting in the rubble with his Baby
Hermes typewriter, he described hospital wards filled with people with no
visible injuries who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague".
For this, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and
smeared. His witness to the truth was never forgiven.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of premeditated mass
murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. It was justified by
lies that form the bedrock of America's war propaganda in the 21st century,
casting a new enemy, and target - China.
During the 75 years since Hiroshima, the most enduring lie is that the
atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and to save lives.
"Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States
Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have
exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and
obviate the need for invasion. "Based on a detailed investigation of all the
facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders
involved, it is the Survey's opinion that . Japan would have surrendered
even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not
entered the war [against Japan] and even if no invasion had been planned or
contemplated."
The National Archives in Washington contains documented Japanese peace
overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by
the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the U.S. made clear the
Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if
the terms were hard". Nothing was done.
The U.S. Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was
"fearful" that the U.S. Air Force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the
new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". Stimson later admitted
that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve
surrender merely in order not to have to use the [atomic] bomb".
Stimson's foreign policy colleagues - looking ahead to the post-war era they
were then shaping "in our image", as Cold War planner George Kennan famously
put it - made clear they were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the
[atomic] bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves,
director of the Manhattan Project that made the atomic bomb, testified:
"There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that
the project was conducted on that basis."
The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Harry Truman voiced his
satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".
The "experiment" continued long after the war was over. Between 1946 and
1958, the United States exploded 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands in
the Pacific: the equivalent of more than one Hiroshima every day for 12
years.
The human and environmental consequences were catastrophic. During the
filming of my documentary, The Coming War on China, I chartered a small
aircraft and flew to Bikini Atoll in the Marshalls. It was here that the
United States exploded the world's first Hydrogen Bomb. It remains poisoned
earth. My shoes registered "unsafe" on my Geiger counter. Palm trees stood
in unworldly formations. There were no birds.
Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test Site Marshall Islands. (UNESCO)
I trekked through the jungle to the concrete bunker where, at 6.45 on the
morning of March 1, 1954, the button was pushed. The sun, which had risen,
rose again and vaporised an entire island in the lagoon, leaving a vast
black hole, which from the air is a menacing spectacle: a deathly void in a
place of beauty.
The radioactive fall-out spread quickly and "unexpectedly". The official
history claims "the wind changed suddenly". It was the first of many lies,
as declassified documents and the victims' testimony reveal.
Gene Curbow, a meteorologist assigned to monitor the test site, said, "They
knew where the radioactive fall-out was going to go. Even on the day of the
shot, they still had an opportunity to evacuate people, but [people] were
not evacuated; I was not evacuated. The United States needed some guinea
pigs to study what the effects of radiation would do."
Marshall Islander Nerje Joseph with a photograph of her as a child soon
after the H-Bomb exploded on March 1, 1954
Like Hiroshima, the secret of the Marshall Islands was a calculated
experiment on the lives of large numbers of people. This was Project 4.1,
which began as a scientific study of mice and became an experiment on "human
beings exposed to the radiation of a nuclear weapon".
The Marshall Islanders I met in 2015 - like the survivors of Hiroshima I
interviewed in the 1960s and 70s - suffered from a range of cancers,
commonly thyroid cancer; thousands had already died. Miscarriages and
stillbirths were common; those babies who lived were often deformed
horribly.
Unlike Bikini, nearby Rongelap atoll had not been evacuated during the
H-Bomb test. Directly downwind of Bikini, Rongelap's skies darkened and it
rained what first appeared to be snowflakes. Food and water were
contaminated; and the population fell victim to cancers. That is still true
today.
I met Nerje Joseph, who showed me a photograph of herself as a child on
Rongelap. She had terrible facial burns and much of her was hair missing.
"We were bathing at the well on the day the bomb exploded," she said. "White
dust started falling from the sky. I reached to catch the powder. We used it
as soap to wash our hair. A few days later, my hair started falling out."
Lemoyo Abon said, "Some of us were in agony. Others had diarrhoea. We were
terrified. We thought it must be the end of the world."
U.S. official archive film I included in my film refers to the islanders as
"amenable savages". In the wake of the explosion, a U.S. Atomic Energy
Agency official is seen boasting that Rongelap "is by far the most
contaminated place on earth", adding, "it will be interesting to get a
measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment."
American scientists, including medical doctors, built distinguished careers
studying the "human uptake". There they are in flickering film, in their
white coats, attentive with their clipboards. When an islander died in his
teens, his family received a sympathy card from the scientist who studied
him.
"Baker Shot", part of Operation Crossroads, a U.S. nuclear test at Bikini
Atoll in 1946. (U.S. Defense Dept.)
I have reported from five nuclear "ground zeros" throughout the world - in
Japan, the Marshall Islands, Nevada, Polynesia and Maralinga in Australia.
Even more than my experience as a war correspondent, this has taught me
about the ruthlessness and immorality of great power: that is, imperial
power, whose cynicism is the true enemy of humanity.
This struck me forcibly when I filmed at Taranaki Ground Zero at Maralinga
in the Australian desert. In a dish-like crater was an obelisk on which was
inscribed: "A British atomic weapon was test exploded here on 9 October
1957". On the rim of the crater was this sign:
WARNING: RADIATION HAZARD
Radiation levels for a few hundred metres
around this point may be above those considered
safe for permanent occupation.
For as far as the eye could see, and beyond, the ground was irradiated. Raw
plutonium lay about, scattered like talcum powder: plutonium is so dangerous
to humans that a third of a milligram gives a 50 percent chance of cancer.
The only people who might have seen the sign were Indigenous Australians,
for whom there was no warning. According to an official account, if they
were lucky "they were shooed off like rabbits".
The Enduring Menace
Today, an unprecedented campaign of propaganda is shooing us all off like
rabbits. We are not meant to question the daily torrent of anti-Chinese
rhetoric, which is rapidly overtaking the torrent of anti-Russia rhetoric.
Anything Chinese is bad, anathema, a threat: Wuhan .. Huawei. How confusing
it is when "our" most reviled leader says so.
The current phase of this campaign began not with Trump but with Barack
Obama, who in 2011 flew to Australia to declare the greatest build-up of
U.S. naval forces in the Asia-Pacific region since World War Two. Suddenly,
China was a "threat". This was nonsense, of course. What was threatened was
America's unchallenged psychopathic view of itself as the richest, the most
successful, the most "indispensable" nation.
What was never in dispute was its prowess as a bully - with more than 30
members of the United Nations suffering American sanctions of some kind and
a trail of the blood running through defenceless countries bombed, their
governments overthrown, their elections interfered with, their resources
plundered.
Obama's declaration became known as the "pivot to Asia". One of its
principal advocates was his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who, as
WikiLeaks revealed, wanted to rename the Pacific Ocean "the American Sea".
Whereas Clinton never concealed her warmongering, Obama was a maestro of
marketing. "I state clearly and with conviction," said the new president in
2009, "that America's commitment is to seek the peace and security of a
world without nuclear weapons."
Obama speaks about 60 years of the U.S.-Australian alliance in Darwin,
Australia, Nov. 17, 2011. (Sgt. Pete Thibodeau/Wikimedia Commons)
Obama increased spending on nuclear warheads faster than any president since
the end of the Cold War. A "usable" nuclear weapon was developed. Known as
the B61 Model 12, it means, according to General James Cartwright, former
vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that "going smaller [makes its use]
more thinkable".
The target is China. Today, more than 400 American military bases almost
encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and nuclear weapons. From
Australia north through the Pacific to South-East Asia, Japan and Korea and
across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, as one U.S.
strategist told me, "the perfect noose".
The Unthinkable
A study by the RAND Corporation - which, since Vietnam, has planned
America's wars - is entitled War with China: Thinking Through the
Unthinkable. Commissioned by the U.S. Army, the authors evoke the infamous
catch cry of its chief Cold War strategist, Herman Kahn - "thinking the
unthinkable". Kahn's book, On Thermonuclear War, elaborated a plan for a
"winnable" nuclear war.
Kahn's apocalyptic view is shared by Trump's Secretary of State Mike Pompeo,
an evangelical fanatic who believes in the "rapture of the End". He is
perhaps the most dangerous man alive. "I was CIA director," he boasted, "We
lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses."
Pompeo's obsession is China.
The endgame of Pompeo's extremism is rarely if ever discussed in the
Anglo-American media, where the myths and fabrications about China are
standard fare, as were the lies about Iraq. A virulent racism is the
sub-text of this propaganda. Classified "yellow" even though they were
white, the Chinese are the only ethnic group to have been banned by an
"exclusion act" from entering the United States, because they were Chinese.
Popular culture declared them sinister, untrustworthy, "sneaky", depraved,
diseased, immoral.
An Australian magazine, The Bulletin, was devoted to promoting fear of the
"yellow peril" as if all of Asia was about to fall down on the whites-only
colony by the force of gravity.
'The Chinese Octopus', The Bulletin, Sydney 1886, an early promoter of the
"Yellow Peril" and other stereotypes.
As the historian Martin Powers writes, acknowledging China's modernism, its
secular morality and "contributions to liberal thought threatened European
face, so it became necessary to suppress China's role in the Enlightenment
debate .. For centuries, China's threat to the myth of Western superiority
has made it an easy target for race-baiting."
In the Sydney Morning Herald, tireless China-basher Peter Hartcher described
those who spread Chinese influence in Australia as "rats, flies, mosquitoes
and sparrows". Hartcher, who favourably quotes the American demagogue Steve
Bannon, likes to interpret the "dreams" of the current Chinese elite, to
which he is apparently privy. These are inspired by yearnings for the
"Mandate of Heaven" of 2,000 years ago. Ad nausea.
To combat this "mandate", the Australian government of Scott Morrison has
committed one of the most secure countries on earth, whose major trading
partner is China, to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of American
missiles that can be fired at China.
The trickledown is already evident. In a country historically scarred by
violent racism towards Asians, Australians of Chinese descent have formed a
vigilante group to protect delivery riders. Phone videos show a delivery
rider punched in the face and a Chinese couple racially abused in a
supermarket. Between April and June, there were almost 400 racist attacks on
Asian-Australians.
"We are not your enemy," a high-ranking strategist in China told me, "but if
you [in the West] decide we are, we must prepare without delay." China's
arsenal is small compared with America's, but it is growing fast, especially
the development of maritime missiles designed to destroy fleets of ships.
"For the first time," wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned
Scientists, "China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert
so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack. This would be
a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy."
In Washington, I met Amitai Etzioni, distinguished professor of
international affairs at George Washington University, who wrote that a
"blinding attack on China" was planned, "with strikes that could be
mistakenly perceived [by the Chinese] as pre-emptive attempts to take out
its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into a terrible use-it-or-lose-it
dilemma [that would] lead to nuclear war."
In 2019, the U.S. staged its biggest single military exercise since the Cold
War, much of it in high secrecy. An armada of ships and long-range bombers
rehearsed an "Air-Sea Battle Concept for China" - ASB - blocking sea lanes
in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China's access to oil, gas and
other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.
It is fear of such a blockade that has seen China develop its Belt and Road
Initiative along the old Silk Road to Europe and urgently build strategic
airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands.
In Shanghai, I met Lijia Zhang, a Beijing journalist and novelist, typical
of a new class of outspoken mavericks. Her best-selling book has the ironic
title Socialism Is Great! Having grown up in the chaotic, brutal Cultural
Revolution, she has travelled and lived in the U.S. and Europe. "Many
Americans imagine," she said, "that Chinese people live a miserable,
repressed life with no freedom whatsoever. The [idea of] the yellow peril
has never left them. They have no idea there are some 500 million people
being lifted out of poverty, and some would say it's 600 million."
Modern China's epic achievements, its defeat of mass poverty, and the pride
and contentment of its people (measured forensically by American pollsters
such as Pew) are wilfully unknown or misunderstood in the West. This alone
is a commentary on the lamentable state of Western journalism and the
abandonment of honest reporting.
China's repressive dark side and what we like to call its "authoritarianism"
are the facade we are allowed to see almost exclusively. It is as if we are
fed unending tales of the evil super-villain Dr. Fu Manchu. And it is time
we asked why: before it is too late to stop the next Hiroshima.