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http://johnpilger.com/articles/break-the-silence-a-world-war-is-beckoning
Break the silence: a world war is beckoning
13 May 2014
Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our
name? Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our
indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a "brilliant, even witty, highly
successful act of hypnosis", as if the truth "never happened even while it was
happening".
Every year the American historian William Blum publishes
his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy" which shows that, since
1945, the US has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many
democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed
the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons;
and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.
In many cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree
of human suffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the west,
despite the presence of the world's most advanced communications and nominally
freest journalism. That the most numerous victims of terrorism - "our" terrorism
- are Muslims, is unsayable. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was
nurtured as a weapon of Anglo-American policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan)
is suppressed. In April the US state department noted that, following Nato's
campaign in 2011, "Libya has become a terrorist safe haven".
The name of "our" enemy has changed over the years, from
communism to Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of western
power and occupying strategically useful or resource-rich territory. The leaders
of these obstructive nations are usually violently shoved aside, such as the
democrats Muhammad Mossedeq in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they are
murdered like Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. All are subjected to a western media
campaign of caricature and vilification - think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, now
Vladimir Putin.
Washington's role in Ukraine is different only in its
implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the Reagan years, the
US is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans
now military outposts of Nato, the last "buffer state" bordering Russia is being
torn apart. We in the west are backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian
Nazis backed Hitler. Having masterminded the coup in February against the
democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington's planned seizure of
Russia's historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The
Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every threat and
invasion from the west for almost a century.
But Nato's military encirclement has accelerated, along
with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be
provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role will justify a
Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.
Instead, Putin has confounded the war party by seeking an
accommodation with Washington and the EU, by withdrawing troops from the
Ukrainian border and urging ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the
weekend's provocative referendum. These Russian-speaking and bilingual people -
a third of Ukraine's population - have long sought a democratic federation that
reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent
of Moscow. Most are neither "separatists" nor "rebels" but citizens who want to
live securely in their homeland.
Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been
turned into a CIA theme park - run by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with
"special units" from the CIA and FBI setting up a "security structure" that
oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup. Watch the
videos, read the eye-witness reports from the massacre in Odessa this month.
Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing 41 people
trapped inside. Watch the police standing by. A doctor described trying to
rescue people, "but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals. One of them
pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going
to meet the same fate... I wonder, why the whole world is keeping
silent."
Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for survival.
When Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, the Kiev
junta's defence secretary - a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party -
boasted that the attacks on "insurgents" would continue. In Orwellian style,
propaganda in the west has inverted this to Moscow "trying to orchestrate
conflict and provocation", according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched
by Obama's grotesque congratulations to the coup junta on its "remarkable
restraint" following the Odessa massacre. Illegal and fascist-dominated, the
junta is described by Obama as "duly elected". What matters is not truth, Henry
Kissinger once said, but "but what is perceived to be true."
In the US media the Odessa atrocity has been played down
as "murky" and a "tragedy" in which "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) attacked
"separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal
Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal damned the victims - "Deadly
Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says". Propaganda in Germany
has been pure cold war, with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning its
readers of Russia's "undeclared war". For Germans, it is an invidious irony that
Putin is the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century
Europe.
A popular truism is that "the world changed" following
9/11. But what has changed? According to the great whistleblower Daniel
Ellsberg, a silent coup has taken place in Washington and rampant militarism now
rules. The Pentagon currently runs "special operations" - secret wars - in 124
countries. At home, rising poverty and hemorrhaging liberty are the historic
corollary of a perpetual war state. Add the risk of nuclear war, and the
question begs: why do we tolerate this?
This article first appeared in the Guardian,
UK
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