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.
Some readers will remember the black and white Hollywood film
starring Gregory Peck as the US Navy commander who takes his submarine to
Australia to await the silent, formless spectre descending on the last of the
living world.
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.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.
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.
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
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.
The urgency has plenty of precedents. In my film, The Coming War
on China, John Bordne, a member of a US 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 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.
Reprinted
from JohnPilger.com.
John Pilger
is the author of Freedom Next Time. All his documentary films can be viewed
free on www.johnpilger.com.
Copyright © 2017 John Pilger
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