Consortiumnews
Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995
How the World May End
August 4, 2017
Republicans and Democrats along with a complicit mainstream media are
plunging ahead toward war with Russia, a mad groupthink that could end life
on the planet, observes John Pilger.
By John Pilger
The U.S. submarine captain says, Weve all got to die one day, some sooner
and some later. The trouble always has been that youre never ready, because
you dont know when its coming. Well, now we do know and theres nothing to
be done about it.
Gregory Peck in a scene from the 1959 movie, On the Beach, showing how a
nuclear war ends life on the planet.
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. Eliots poem The Hollow Men appear at the beginning of
Nevil Shutes 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.
Some readers will remember the black and white Hollywood film starring
Gregory Peck as the U.S. Navy commander who takes his submarine to Australia
to await the silent, formless specter descending on the last of the living
world.
I read On the Beach for the first time the other day, finishing it as the
U.S. Congress passed a law to wage economic war on Russia, the worlds
second most lethal nuclear power. There was no justification for this insane
vote, except the promise of plunder.
Aiming Toward a Hot War
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.
Russian President Vladimir Putin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on May
10, 2015, at the Kremlin. (Photo from Russian government)
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 1861-65 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 Indochina, 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 wasnt happening. It didnt
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.
Trump is mad, a fascist, a dupe of Russia. He is also a gift for liberal
brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics, wrote Luciana
Bohne memorably. The obsession with Trump the man not Trump as a symptom
and caricature of an enduring system beckons great danger for all of us.
A Narcissistic Media
While they pursue their fossilized 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.
The Washington Post building in downtown Washington, D.C. (Photo credit:
Washington Post)
On 3 Aug., 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 install an unstable, aggressive regime on
Russias borderland the way through which Hitler invaded, causing the
deaths of 27 million people. Their goal is to dismember the modern Russian
Federation.
In response, partnership is a word used incessantly by Vladimir Putin
anything, it seems, that might halt an evangelical drive to war in the
United States. Incredulity in Russia may have now turned to fear and perhaps
a certain resolution. The Russians almost certainly have war-gamed nuclear
counter strikes. Air-raid drills are not uncommon. Their history tells them
to get ready.
The threat is simultaneous. Russia is first, China is next. The U.S. 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 Chinas economic lifelines.
The admiral commanding the U.S. 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 Shutes fiction.
Silencing Dissenting Journalists
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.
A poster for the 1959 classic, On the Beach, telling the story of the last
days of life on earth.
The urgency has plenty of precedents. In my film, The Coming War on China,
John Bordne, a member of a U.S. Air Force missile combat crew based in
Okinawa, Japan, describes how in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis he
and his colleagues were told to launch all the missiles from their silos.
Nuclear armed, the missiles were aimed at both China and Russia. A junior
officer questioned this, and the order was eventually rescinded but only
after they were issued with service revolvers and ordered to shoot at others
in a missile crew if they did not stand down.
At the height of the Cold War, the anti-communist hysteria in the United
States was such that U.S. 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
worlds 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 Americas modern wars were started not by conservatives, but by
liberal Democrats.
When Obama left office, he presided over a record seven wars, including
Americas 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 Obamas last acts as president was to sign a bill that handed a
record $618 billion 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.
John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist based in London. Pilgers
Web site is: www.johnpilger.com. His new film, The Coming War on China, is
available in the U.S. from www.bullfrogfilms.com