September
7, 2023
To go over
a 2016 article by the renowned journalist now, in 2023, is like watching
someone placing flags next to recently planted seeds that would eventually grow
into the towering problems our world now faces.
In March
of 2016 the renowned Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger published
an article titled “A world war has begun. Break the silence.” which urgently
warned of the U.S. empire’s aggressive escalations against Russia and China.
Re-reading parts of it in 2023 is like watching someone placing flags next to
recently planted seeds that would eventually grow into the towering problems
our world now faces.
It’s like
listening to a time traveler warning people from the past about a grave mistake
they were about to make. Pilger points to U.S. provocations in Ukraine, NATO
militarism and the encirclement of China and warns of the surging risk of
nuclear war, noting that nuclear warhead spending “rose higher under [Barack]
Obama than under any American president.”
“In the
last 18 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,”
Pilger wrote. “Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops
presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.”
“Ukraine —
once part of the Soviet Union — has become a C.I.A. theme park,” wrote Pilger.
“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.
Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the
notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the
persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.”
“In
Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia — the U.S. military is
deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons,” Pilger said. “This extreme
provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the
West.”
“What
makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign
against China,” Pilger continued. “The United States is encircling China with a
network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear-armed
bombers. This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific,
the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa,
Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose
around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.”
Pilger
highlighted the way his home country Australia was being roped into
Washington’s war preparations against China, a trend which has since grown much
worse as the drums of war grow louder.
“In 2015,
in high secrecy, the U.S. and Australia staged the biggest single air-sea
military exercise in recent history, known as Talisman Saber,” he wrote. “Its
aim was to rehearse an Air-Sea Battle Plan, blocking sea lanes, such as the
Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits, that cut off China’s access to oil,
gas and other vital raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.”
Pilger
wrote all this while preparing to release his excellent film The Coming War on
China, which would come out later that year. In it, he shows how the U.S. has
been surrounding China with war machinery in a way that would be considered an
act of war if it was happening near American shorelines, and drives home the
seriousness of the prospect of nuclear conflict.
Everything
Pilger warned about turned out to be everything he said it was. A war in
Ukraine has erupted from the spark of the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 and Russia’s
fear of an increasingly expansionist and militaristic NATO, while the U.S.
military encirclement of China has been rapidly increasing as hostilities
between the two superpowers accelerate toward a breaking point, facilitated in
no small part by the continent-sized military base known as Australia. What
were only background stories in 2016 now dominate the headlines of today.
I bring
this up because I think it’s useful to show that we’ve been on this track
toward global conflict between major powers for years, and it’s been unfolding
in ways that some saw coming from miles away. Much of Pilger’s work could be
called prophetic, but Pilger is no prophet — he’s just a journalist with an ear
to the ground who’s been critically scrutinizing the behavior of the empire for
decades. He was able to accurately mark the trajectory our world has been on
earlier than most and it has continued along that same trajectory with
frightening speed ever since.
If you can
see the trajectory that an object is on, you can determine where you need to
stand in order to obstruct its path. The fact that we’ve been on a linear
trajectory toward global conflict between nuclear-armed states all these years
shows that opposing that trajectory is of existential importance for every
living organism on this planet. And yet the media still want us focused on
celebrity gossip and party politics and Donald Trump.
World war
is still closing in on us. We still need to break the silence and oppose it.
Our rulers have been steering us in this direction for a long time now, and
they’re not going to turn away until we make them.
Caitlin
Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece
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All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
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