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jeffnz

John Pilger talks nuclear weapons and World War 3

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I like John Pilgers uncensored way of speaking.

I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”

 

Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 — the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for twelve years.

 

Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter.

 

Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called “Bravo”. The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

 

On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women’s Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.” A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different “bikini bodies”; each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers.

 

Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

http://johnpilger.com/articles/a-world-war-has-begun-break-the-silence-

 

https://www.sott.net/article/331232-John-Pilger-A-World-War-has-begun-Break-the-Silence

 

The 2nd link has a video of this presentation.

 

Edit: bad font colour from copy and paste

Edited by jeffnz

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I like John Pilgers uncensored way of speaking.

I would not describe this as "uncensored", I think "sensationalist" is a much more appropriate word.

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I like how the top quote on his website is one from himself. He sure isn't censoring his high opinion of himself. :D

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I like John Pilgers uncensored way of speaking.

 

Who?

 

Edit: bad font colour from copy and paste

 

You can avoid that by selecting the text you want and clicking the "Remove Format" button in the Post Editor.

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Who?

 

He's an Australian and he's been around for ages, doing important journalism. About 5 years ago John Pilger made a film called The War You Don't See. Great film btw. It isn't rated (for violent content) so it isn't in stores. Torrent it.

 

You can avoid that by selecting the text you want and clicking the "Remove Format" button in the Post Editor.

 

Usually I copy into a text editor, then copy out of the text editor - I'm still living in the 1990s! Thanks for the useful advice.

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The War You Don't See

 

Sounds like tin foil hat material.

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So-called "important" journalism is conspiracy couched as faux journalism. Clicks and views. That's all it is now.

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He's an Australian and he's been around for ages, doing important journalism. About 5 years ago John Pilger made a film called The War You Don't See. Great film btw. It isn't rated (for violent content) so it isn't in stores. Torrent it.

 

So you're saying his some kind of Aussie Alex Jones? :P

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Sounds like tin foil hat material.

 

I watched The War You Don't See in 2011, I don't recall it being conspiratorial. The film mostly talks about media coverage of war. The film's opening quote is about World War One, when British politicians (or was it generals?) said: "if the people knew the truth, the war would be over tomorrow". In other words, people would be outraged.

 

So you're saying his some kind of Aussie Alex Jones? :P

 

Nice try at being funny but nooooooo. He isn't an Aussie Alex Jones, because he isn't producing a dozen videos every day, nor does John Pilger sell supplements that make you "awake" ;)

 

John Pilger is old skool. He infiltrated Burma when it was 100x more repressive than it is today. His cover, was that he worked for an exotic travel company! Alex Jones may have infiltrated Bohemian Grove back in 2000, but that was within America. Alex Jones wouldn't have the "balls" to go to a repressive 3rd world country. Not then, and not now. Alex Jones isn't even really a journalist, he's a host of a talk radio show, and a political agitator. Pilger is a journalist, one of the old school ones who actually investigates stuff.

Edited by jeffnz

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The film mostly talks about media coverage of war. The film's opening quote is about World War One, when British politicians (or was it generals?) said: "if the people knew the truth, the war would be over tomorrow". In other words, people would be outraged.

 

You thought otherwise before the film?

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Alright, let's have a look at this guy "who actually investigates stuff" i.e. the article you linked to. I'll quote a couple sections that stand out to me.

 

Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island.

 

Few? Isn't that common knowledge? Anyway, it's probably not that important.

 

How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.

 

If propaganda being spread (which is essentially just political conflict) or the possibility of war breaking out constitutes as warfare, humanity probably has been at war since the Stone Age. This kind of makes the calling it a war pointless.

 

The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.

 

According to Stephen Schwartz's Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, the USA spent at least (probably more) 5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons from 1940 to 1996. Obama's trillion is spread over three decades, and it's less than what was spend before.

 

In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two -- led by the United States -- is taking place along Russia's western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.

 

Did he sleep through the Cold War? There are about 60,000 U.S. troops in Europe right now (all of it, not just Eastern Europe). That's nothing compared to the Cold War.

 

Ukraine - once part of the Soviet Union - has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally.

 

He probably means Svoboda. Svoboda is not part of the government. They only hold local political positions.

 

In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia -- next door to Russia - the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world's second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

 

The troops are there at the request of the Baltic states. Last time I checked, Russia doesn't have sovereignty over said states.

 

All of them said that had journalists and broadcasters done their job and questioned the propaganda that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; had the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair not been amplified and echoed by journalists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not have happened, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today.

 

Maybe the climate was different in Australia, but here in Europe, nobody believed that Iraq actually had WMDs. NOBODY. Not for a second. Not even the few proponents of the war did. I don't recall a single news outlet from the time who "echoed" that. There were plenty of cartoons instead.

 

Trump's views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.

 

Really? David Cameron's pandering to the Tory right is equal to trump's asinine Mexican border wall plan?

 

I'll stop here, but let's just say that Pilger doesn't seem to bother "investigating" a lot for an investigative journalist.

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I'll quote a couple sections that stand out to me.

I started doing that in my reply, but there was just too much.

nobody believed that Iraq actually had WMDs.

Technically, there actually were WMDs, but not the ones Bush was looking for. They did find old Scud missiles that were more or less defunct, but since these weapons were not prepared for actual use, Bush ordered the discoveries to be hushed because he considered it more embarrassing than finding nothing at all and believed (possibly to this day) that there still were legitimate WMDs they just hadn't found yet. There are documents released with the Freedom of Information Act that record this (I've read it personally), but the media didn't consider it an interesting enough story, so the general belief is still "nothing was found".

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So here is some view of a guy living next to Russia, in country being controlled by Moscow for over 45 years.

 

In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia -- next door to Russia - the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world's second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

 

Like TaxOwlbear said, the Baltic states asked for such help. You see, after 2nd WW Stalin decided to build "internationalist" country by moving nations all over USSR to weaken the resistance against communism being adopted in new Soviet republics. Many Latvians, Estonians, Germans, Poles and many many more ethnic minorities within USSR were relocated to Central Asia. Moreover, many Russians were moved to Baltic Republics and it is estimated that in just small Estonia lives around 300.000 Russians, which is at least disturbing if Donetsk or Crimea scenario would be repeated.

 

However i do understand Russian point of view, because NATO bases are getting closer and closer towards their borders, and if i recall correctly there was some treaty about not moving NATO bases to new NATO members. So yeah... it s not that simple.


In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two -- led by the United States -- is taking place along Russia's western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.

 

Oh c'mon... Crimea, Donetsk?

 

Ukraine - once part of the Soviet Union - has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally.

 

It was even part of Polish - Lithuanian Commonwealth, but i don't see any reason to control Kiev... When your neighbor is attacking your borders, who would you ask for help? Not "world gendarme" like many countries are viewing US?

 

 

@TaxOwlbear

 

Maybe the climate was different in Australia, but here in Europe, nobody believed that Iraq actually had WMDs. NOBODY. Not for a second. Not even the few proponents of the war did. I don't recall a single news outlet from the time who "echoed" that. There were plenty of cartoons instead.

 

I would surprise you how hyped was this conflict in Poland ^^. US was tantalizing polish leftist government, that if we join this "coalition" we will get contracts after the war for rebuilding Iraq... so yeah. Poland for the first time in history had oversea colony:

Iraq_2003_occupation.png

 

We've wasted a quarter billion of US dollars, gained nothing (except hate of little muslim community in Poland and tarnished image of Poland in Middle East - Poles build roads and homes in Iraq, Iran, Syria and other "friendly" countries during Cold War). So yeah... money well spent :P

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I started doing that in my reply, but there was just too much.

Technically, there actually were WMDs, but not the ones Bush was looking for. They did find old Scud missiles that were more or less defunct, but since these weapons were not prepared for actual use, Bush ordered the discoveries to be hushed because he considered it more embarrassing than finding nothing at all and believed (possibly to this day) that there still were legitimate WMDs they just hadn't found yet. There are documents released with the Freedom of Information Act that record this (I've read it personally), but the media didn't consider it an interesting enough story, so the general belief is still "nothing was found".

 

I'll give you that. I do remember some rusty rockets (from an essay I wrote in school shortly after the actual war), but the few people who believed that were probably expecting stock piles of sarin gas or so.

 

 

However i do understand Russian point of view, because NATO bases are getting closer and closer towards their borders, and if i recall correctly there was some treaty about not moving NATO bases to new NATO members. So yeah... it s not that simple.

 

There is an alleged promise by the U.S. president from the early 90s that Nato wouldn't allow former Warshaw Pact members to join. However, it's only that - an alleged promise. There's no treaty, and the Russian foreign minister at the time does in fact deny that such a promise has been made, whereas others, such as the Russian president at the time, claimed there was such a promise.

 

The issue is that there is no evidence whatsoever. It's just a claim. There is also the issue that it is actually beyond the U.S. president's authority to make such a promise without congress etc.

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