Not for tourists is the US building its fifth-biggest embassy. Oil was found in Haiti’s waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington's ‘rollback’ plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela’s abundant petroleum reserves, and sabotage of the growing regional co-operation long denied by US-sponsored regimes. John Pilger, article January 2010 ‘The Kidnapping of Haiti’
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 Mosaddegh 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. John Pilger, article 13th May 2014, ‘Break the Silence: A World War is Beckoning’; viz also website
China is building airstrips in the south China sea … China itself is under threat – these American bases form a giant noose encircling China with [US] missiles, bombers, warships. John Pilger ***** The Coming War on China, ITV 2016
The response of the United States is to deploy the majority of its naval forces to Asia and the Pacific … The target is China. ibid.
Is the US already at war with China? ibid.
The secret of the Marshall Islands: they’ve long been America’s strategic secret … The United States took over the Marshall Islands as a trust territory … A nightmare began: the islands were turned into a laboratory for the testing of nuclear weapons and the people into guinea pigs. ibid.
An armada of warships was assembled in Bikini lagoon in order to blow them to bits. ibid.
‘Please help these efforts and leave this property as you find it. Thank you for your kindness and understanding.’ ibid. US sign in bunker on Bikini Island
All of these [Bikini] women have had thyroid cancer. ibid.
The second generation, the children, were also poisoned. ibid.
The islanders called on Greenpeace to rescue them. ibid.
A mere $150 million in compensation. ibid.
‘We have babies we called jellyfish babies. Babies born on a labour-table moves up and down like this.’ ibid. World Council of Churches speech 1983 Marshall Islands health worker on birth of second-generation irradiated babies
The Ronald Reagan missile test site. ibid.
The Japanese island of Okinawa is occupied by thirty-two military installations: from here the United States has attacked Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq … Okinawa is the front line of a beckoning war with China. ibid.
These fences run like great ribbons across the islands. And the bases themselves cut swathes across Okinawa. But all around them are people with this continuing demonstration, this continuing resistance. ibid.
This is the centre of an empire that never speaks its name, whose power is represented in this extraordinary world-map of American military bases. 4,000 bases in the United States, almost 1,000 bases spread across every continent. ibid.
There is another superpower and that’s us. Ordinary people everywhere … By speaking out, they deliver a warning to all of us: can we really afford to be silent. ibid.
Delete Vietnam and write in El Salvador and the stories seem almost identical. Like the politicians then, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, the politicians now, Haig and Reagan, see the world in the same arrogant simplistic terms, speaking of dominoes as if nations are mere blocks of wood, not societies riven with their own differences and animosities. Today as before honest men pay with their careers. The American ambassador to El Salvador Robert White has said that the war in that country is caused by social injustice, and the real terrorists are the regime backed by Mr Reagan and Mr Haig, and backed of course by the British government. John Pilger, Heroes! ITV 1981
Diego Garcia: I don’t often use the word incredible but ... when a group of us found classified files in the public record office in London, it revealed how the American and British governments had conspired to expel the entire population of this British colony – all of them British citizens, and dumped them in the slums of Mauritius ... They started killing their pets, they shots their dogs ... The message was clear, you’re next unless you go! John Pilger, Democracy Now! interview
The world now demands the maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit and we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventures in Vietnam that we have been detrimental to the lives of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn softly from our present ways. The New Testament says, Repent. It is time for America to repent now. For the Kingdom of God is at hand. Martin Luther King
And don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine messianic force to be some policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems as if I can hear God saying to America, You’re too arrogant. If you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power. And I’ll place it into the hands of a nation that don’t even know my name. Martin Luther King
If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue? Martin Luther King
I think that part of the Weatherman phenomenon that was right was our understanding of what the position of the United States is in the world. It was this knowledge that we just couldn’t handle; it was too big. We didn’t know what to do. In a way I still don’t know what to do with this knowledge. I don’t know what needs to be done now, and it’s still eating away at me just as it did thirty years ago. Green & Siegel, The Weather Underground, Mark Rudd, 2002
Moreover as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard p211, 1997
The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world’s paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and indeed the first truly global power. ibid.
For America the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia. ibid.
The three grand imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together. ibid.
But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely most important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals including gold. ibid.
Without sustained and directed American involvement, before long the forces of global disorder could come to dominate the world scene. And the possibility of such a fragmentation is inherent in the geopolitical tensions not only of today’s Eurasia but of the world more generally. ibid.
America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last. ibid.
The mistakes of the Iraq war are not only tactical and strategic, but historical. It is essentially a war of colonialism, attempted in the post-colonial age. Zbigniew Brzezinski, interview The NewsHour 11th January 2007
War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world’s first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions. Zbigniew Brzezinski