John Pilger: Silencing America as it Prepares for War

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Silencing America 
as it Prepares for War 








By John Pilger

Returning to the 
United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered 
four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when 
he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in 
the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at 
the Democratic Party’s rigged convention.  The great counter revolution had 
begun.

The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had 
dared link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When 
Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”, she 
spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America’s victims in faraway 
places.

“We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died 
defending your freedom. Now don’t you forget it.”  So said a National Parks 
Service guide as I filmed last week at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He 
was addressing a school party of young teenagers in bright orange T-shirts. As 
if by rote, he inverted the truth about Vietnam into an unchallenged 
lie.

The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and 
dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young minds, 
not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own lives. A friend 
of mine, a marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam, was often asked, “Which 
side did you fight on?”

A few years ago, I attended a popular exhibition 
called “The Price of Freedom” at the venerable Smithsonian Institution in 
Washington. The lines of ordinary people, mostly children shuffling through a 
Santa’s grotto of revisionism, were dispensed a variety of lies: the atomic 
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved “a million lives”; Iraq was “liberated 
[by] air strikes of unprecedented precision”. The theme was unerringly heroic: 
only Americans pay the price of freedom.

The 2016 election campaign is 
remarkable not only for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders but also for 
the resilience of an enduring silence about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. 
A third of the members of the United Nations have felt Washington’s boot, 
overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and boycotts. 
Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal – Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, 
Carter, Clinton, Obama.

The breathtaking record of perfidy is so mutated 
in the public mind, wrote the late Harold Pinter, 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. It didn’t matter … “. Pinter expressed a 
mock admiration for what he called “a quite clinical manipulation of power 
worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, 
even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Take Obama. As he 
prepares to leave office, the fawning has begun all over again. He is “cool”. 
One of the more violent presidents, Obama gave full reign to the Pentagon 
war-making apparatus of his discredited predecessor. He prosecuted more 
whistleblowers – truth-tellers – than any president. He pronounced Chelsea 
Manning guilty before she was tried. Today, Obama runs an unprecedented 
worldwide campaign of terrorism and murder by drone.

In 2009, Obama 
promised to help “rid the world of nuclear weapons” and was awarded the Nobel 
Peace Prize.  No American president has built more nuclear warheads than 
Obama. He is “modernising” America’s doomsday arsenal, including a new “mini” 
nuclear weapon, whose size and “smart” technology, says a leading general, 
ensure its use is “no longer unthinkable”.

James Bradley, the 
best-selling author of Flags of Our Fathers and son of one of the US marines who 
raised the flag on Iwo Jima, said, “[One] great myth we’re seeing play out is 
that of Obama as some kind of peaceful guy who’s trying to get rid of nuclear 
weapons. He’s the biggest nuclear warrior there is. He’s committed us to a 
ruinous course of spending a trillion dollars on more nuclear weapons. Somehow, 
people live in this fantasy that because he gives vague news conferences and 
speeches and feel-good photo-ops that somehow that’s attached to actual policy. 
It isn’t.”

On Obama’s watch, a second cold war is under way. The Russian 
president is a pantomime villain; the Chinese are not yet back to their sinister 
pig-tailed caricature – when all Chinese were banned from the United States – 
but the media warriors are working on it.

Neither Hillary Clinton nor 
Bernie Sanders has mentioned any of this. There is no risk and no danger for the 
United States and all of us. For them, the greatest military build-up on the 
borders of Russia since World War Two has not happened. On May 11, Romania went 
“live” with a Nato “missile defence” base that aims its first-strike American 
missiles at the heart of Russia, the world’s second nuclear power.

In 
Asia, the Pentagon is sending ships, planes and special forces to the 
Philippines to threaten China. The US already encircles China with hundreds of 
military bases that curve in an arc up from Australia, to Asia and across to 
Afghanistan. Obama calls this a “pivot”.

As a direct consequence, China 
reportedly has changed its nuclear weapons policy from no-first-use to high 
alert and put to sea submarines with nuclear weapons. The escalator is 
quickening.

It was Hillary Clinton who, as Secretary of State in 2010, 
elevated the competing territorial claims for rocks and reef in the South China 
Sea to an international issue; CNN and BBC hysteria followed; China was building 
airstrips on the disputed islands. In its mammoth war game in 2015, Operation 
Talisman Sabre, the US practiced “choking” the Straits of Malacca through which 
pass most of China’s oil and trade. This was not news.

Clinton declared 
that America had a “national interest” in these Asian waters. The Philippines 
and Vietnam were encouraged and bribed to pursue their claims and old enmities 
against China. In America, people are being primed to see any Chinese defensive 
position as offensive, and so the ground is laid for rapid escalation. A similar 
strategy of provocation and propaganda is applied to Russia.

Clinton, the 
“women’s candidate”, leaves a trail of bloody coups: in Honduras, in Libya (plus 
the murder of the Libyan president) and Ukraine. The latter is now a CIA theme 
park swarming with Nazis and the frontline of a beckoning war with Russia. It 
was through Ukraine – literally, borderland -- that Hitler’s Nazis invaded the 
Soviet Union, which lost 27 million people. This epic catastrophe remains a 
presence in Russia. Clinton’s presidential campaign has received money from all 
but one of the world’s ten biggest arms companies. No other candidate comes 
close.

Sanders, the hope of many young Americans, is not very different 
from Clinton in his proprietorial view of the world beyond the United States. He 
backed Bill Clinton’s illegal bombing of Serbia. He supports Obama’s terrorism 
by drone, the provocation of Russia and the return of special forces (death 
squads) to Iraq. He has nothing to say on the drumbeat of threats to China and 
the accelerating risk of nuclear war. He agrees that Edward Snowden should stand 
trial and he calls Hugo Chavez – like him, a social democrat – “a dead communist 
dictator”. He promises to support Clinton if she is nominated.

The 
election of Trump or Clinton is the old illusion of choice that is no choice: 
two sides of the same coin. In scapegoating minorities and promising to “make 
America great again”, Trump is a far right-wing domestic populist; yet the 
danger of Clinton may be more lethal for the world.

“Only Donald Trump 
has said anything meaningful and critical of US foreign policy,” wrote Stephen 
Cohen, emeritus professor of Russian History at Princeton and NYU, one of the 
few Russia experts in the United States to speak out about the risk of 
war.

In a radio broadcast, Cohen referred to critical questions Trump 
alone had raised. Among them: why is the United States “everywhere on the 
globe”? What is NATO’s true mission? Why does the US always pursue regime change 
in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine? Why does Washington treat Russia and Vladimir 
Putin as an enemy?

The hysteria in the liberal media over Trump serves an 
illusion of “free and open debate” and “democracy at work”. His views on 
immigrants and Muslims are grotesque, yet the deporter-in-chief  of 
vulnerable people from America is not Trump but Obama, whose betrayal of people 
of colour is his legacy: such as the warehousing of a mostly black prison 
population, now more numerous than Stalin’s gulag.

This presidential 
campaign may not be about populism but American liberalism, an ideology that 
sees itself as modern and therefore superior and the one true way. Those on its 
right wing bear a likeness to 19th century Christian imperialists, with a 
God-given duty to convert or co-opt or conquer. 

In Britain, this is 
Blairism. The Christian war criminal Tony Blair got away with his secret 
preparation for the invasion of Iraq largely because the liberal political class 
and media fell for his “cool Britannia”. In the Guardian, the applause was 
deafening; he was called “mystical”. A distraction known as identity politics, 
imported from the United States, rested easily in his care. 

History was 
declared over, class was abolished and gender promoted as feminism; lots of 
women became New Labour MPs. They voted on the first day of Parliament to cut 
the benefits of single parents, mostly women, as instructed. A majority voted 
for an invasion that produced 700,000 Iraqi widows.

The equivalent in the 
US are the politically correct warmongers on the New York Times, the Washington 
Post and network TV who dominate political debate. I watched a furious debate on 
CNN about Trump’s infidelities. It was clear, they said, a man like that could 
not be trusted in the White House. No issues were raised. Nothing on the 80 per 
cent of Americans whose income has collapsed to 1970s levels.  Nothing on 
the drift to war. The received wisdom seems to be “hold your nose” and vote for 
Clinton: anyone but Trump. That way, you stop the monster and preserve a system 
gagging for another war.


~ John 
Pilger originally hails from Australia.  Arriving in London, Pilger 
freelanced, then joined Reuters, moving to the London Daily Mirror, Britain's 
biggest selling newspaper, which was then changing to a serious tabloid. He 
became chief foreign correspondent and reported from all over the world, 
covering numerous wars, notably Vietnam. He became the youngest journalist to 
receive Britain's highest award for journalism, Journalist of the Year and was 
the first to win it twice. He also has created many award winning documentaries. 



 

 

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