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The Coming War on China is John Pilger’s most recent film – his 60th documentary and arguably his most prescient. Completed in the month Donald Trump was elected US President, the film investigates the manufacture of a ‘threat’ and the beckoning of a nuclear confrontation.

 

Watch the film on Vimeo.

When the United States, the world’s biggest military power, decided that China, the second largest economic power, was a threat to its imperial dominance, two-thirds of US naval forces were transferred to Asia and the Pacific. This was the ‘pivot to Asia’, announced by President Barack Obama in 2011. China, which in the space of a generation had risen from the chaos of Mao Zedong’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ to an economic prosperity that has seen more than 500 million people lifted out of poverty, was suddenly the United States’s new enemy.

The build-up of naval forces would reinforce the US’s already overwhelmingly superior military position in the region. Seldom referred to in the Western media, 400 American bases surround China with ships, missiles and troops, in an arc that extends from Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India.

The Coming War on China is John Pilger’s most recent film – his 60th documentary and arguably his most prescient. Completed in the month Donald Trump was elected US President, the film investigates the manufacture of a ‘threat’ and the beckoning of a nuclear confrontation.

The film is marked in chapters. Chapter 1 is set in the remote Marshall Islands, in the Pacific, which the United States took over as a United Nations ‘trust territory’ in 1945 with an obligation to ‘protect the population’s health and wellbeing’. From 1946 to 1958, the US exploded the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb every day in the islands, contaminating its people and environment.

Filming on irradiated Bikini Atoll, which cannot be safely inhabited today, perhaps ever, Pilger describes the testing in 1954 of the world’s first hydrogen bomb, codenamed Bravo, which vaporised an entire island, leaving a dark chasm a mile wide in Bikini’s beautiful lagoon. The inhabitants had been moved to a nearby atoll, Rongelap, where the ‘unexpected’ fallout endowed them with multiple cancers.

Declassified documents describe a secret programme originally designed to test the effects of radiation on mice and used in the Marshall Islands on human beings. A US Atomic Energy official of the time describes the island of Rongelap as ‘by far the most contaminated place on Earth’.

The human guinea pigs were regularly monitored and underwent scientific examination. Many suffered thyroid cancer, deformities appeared in babies and countless survivors of the original blast died from radiation poisoning. A claims tribunal was set up and quickly ran out of money. The most moving interviews in the film are with islanders, mostly elderly women, who have survived, precariously, in poverty.

Today, the largest of the Marshall Islands, Kwajalein, is home to one of the United States’s most secretive bases, a missile launch pad designed as a ‘stepping stone to Asia and beyond’ and aimed at China.

Chapter 2 describes China’s remarkable rise. Using rare archive film, Pilger describes ‘the century of humiliation’, when the Chinese were depicted as the ‘yellow peril’ in the West and racial stereotypes were a staple of Hollywood. Author James Bradley describes the opium trade and the colonisation by Britain and the other imperial powers. ‘The American industrial revolution was funded by huge pools of money… from illegal drugs in the biggest market in the world, China,’ he says.

The 1949 Communist revolution marked the end of foreign exploitation but also, ironically, the beginning of a China that almost no ‘expert’ in the West had predicted. ‘Today,’ says Pilger, standing against the ultra-modern skyline of Shanghai, ‘China has matched America at its own great game of capitalism – and that is unforgivable.’

Four hundred miles away, on the Japanese island of Okinawa, 32 American military installations form the front line of a coming war with China. Fumiko Shimabukuro, aged 87, is one of the leaders of a non-violent resistance challenging Washington’s ‘pivot to Asia’. They want the bases closed and point to a warning from the past. In 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, American nuclear missiles were ordered to be launched at China, Russia and North Korea by an officer who, it appears, had lost his mind. Only luck – and the vigilance of another officer – allowed his moment of madness to be countermanded. In a memorable sequence, one of the 1962 missile crew describes how the world was almost destroyed ‘by mistake’.

In 2015, Pilger reports, the US Navy and its regional allies, including Australia, rehearsed a blockade that would cut China’s lifelines of oil, trade and raw materials. Today, President Trump is waging a trade war against China, where the United States’s biggest companies, such as Apple, are based: the source of a trade deficit for which China is cast, in Trump’s world, as the ‘bad guy’. In the meantime, China has built military airstrips in the disputed Spratly Islands, in the South China Sea, and is reported to have placed its nuclear missiles on ‘high alert’.

The Coming War on China was broadcast on ITV in the UK and SBS in Australia, and seen in many other countries, including China, where a pirated version was shown to possibly its biggest audience. ‘It’s not the fairest way to distribute a film,’ said Pilger, ‘but I was delighted. The true story of China and America needs to be told, especially in Australia, where, fuelled by America, an anti-China propaganda campaign seems to be inviting a military reaction.’

Watch the film on Vimeo.

 

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/the-coming-war-on-china/

 

 

MEAWHILE THE US LIES through NATO:

 

  • Nato-Osterweiterung: Aktenfund von 1991 stützt Version Russlands

 

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US support genocide...

 Russia accuses US of genocide denial

 

US is ignoring the targeting of Russian speakers in Ukraine, Moscow’s envoy in Washington said 

America’s willful ignorance of atrocities being committed against Russian-speaking people in Ukraine is causing “outrage and indignation”in Moscow and is an example of Washington’s “double standards,”Russia’s ambassador to the US claimed on Thursday.

Anatoly Antonov’s statement came in response to a comment made by US State Department spokesman Ned Price, who accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of spreading allegations with “no basis of truth.”On Tuesday, Putin claimed that Kiev was committing “genocide” in Donbass, in east Ukraine.

In a statement published on Facebook, Antonov listed the shelling of residential areas and the 2014 Trade Unions House fire in Odessa as examples of Kiev targeting Russian speakers.

He also claimed that mass graves with almost 300 people had been found in the Donbass, and asserted that they had been killed because of their native language. Similar claims have been slammed by the US of being “false narratives.”

“Washington’s beautiful slogans about the supreme value of human rights are not worth a penny. The main geopolitical goal of the United States is to push Russia back to the East as far as possible,” the envoy said. “To that end, a policy to force the Russian-speaking population out of their current places of residence is needed.”

“Americans prefer not only to ignore the attempts of forced assimilation of Russians in Ukraine but also strongly condone them with political and military support,” he continued, adding that the interests of millions of Russians living in Ukraine must be protected, which he called “a guarantee of Ukraine’s statehood and territorial integrity.”

The armed conflict in Ukraine began in 2014, following the events of the Maidan, when violent street protests toppled the democratically elected government in Kiev. Shortly after, two regions declared themselves independent states, named the Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (LPR) People’s Republics.

Moscow has repeatedly refused to recognize the breakaway states as sovereign, instead calling for them to be integrated into Ukraine with a special status. However, earlier this week, the Russian State Duma adopted a resolution urging Putin to recognize their independence.

  READ MORE:https://www.rt.com/russia/549870-accusing-us-genocide-denial/  READ FROM TOP   FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NATO and the USA lied...

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We begin today’s show looking at the roots of the crisis with a former American diplomat who served as the last [sic] U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union prior to the collapse of the USSR. Ambassador Jack Matlock held the post from 1987 to 1991. He was first stationed in Moscow in the early 1960s and was there during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Matlock has written extensively about U.S.-Russian relations. His books include Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended and Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray. His latest article is headlined “I was there: NATO and the origins of the Ukraine crisis.”

In the article, Ambassador Matlock writes about testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a quarter of a century ago and about the possible expansion of NATO. He told the Senate, quote, “I consider the administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.” Ambassador Matlock’s words. And Ambassador Jack Matlock joins us now.

 

Ambassador, that was you speaking a quarter of a century ago. Why is this so important and relevant today?

JACK MATLOCK: Well, thanks for the question. And first of all, I should make one correction: I was not the last ambassador to the Soviet Union; Robert Strauss was. Now, he lasted only about three months of the last in the Soviet Union, and some people have forgotten that, but I should correct that, to start with.

But the reason that I testified, along with a number of other people — many of them had been influential in bringing the Cold War to the end. The reason I testified against expanding NATO expansion — against expanding NATO, in the beginning, in the late ’90s, was because we had — at the end of the Cold War, we had removed the Iron Curtain. We had created what we had aimed for: a Europe whole and free. And it was obvious, if you start piecemeal expanding NATO, you are going to — without including Russia — you are going to once again precipitate a buildup of arms and a competition, an armed competition, then. But there was no reason to do it at that time. Russia was not threatening any East European country. Actually, the Soviet Union in its last years was not, because Gorbachev had accepted the democratization of the East European countries. And actually, one of the last acts of the Soviet parliament was to recognize the freedom and independence of the three Baltic countries, so that we had a Europe whole and free. The task was to build a security architecture that would include them all. And the reason I testified against it was that I saw that a process that we started then, if continued, and if continued up to the borders of the Soviet Union — I mean, to the borders of Russia and included former parts of the Soviet Union that were recognized as part of the Soviet Union at that time, such as, most importantly, Ukraine and Georgia, that this would bring about a confrontation.

And I would say my experience and the experience of others during the Cuban Missile Crisis brought home to us the dangers of a military confrontation between countries that have nuclear weapons. At the time, those of us involved — I was in Moscow at the American Embassy — that was involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, did not understand how close we came to a nuclear exchange. We learned that only later. But it would have been a disaster for both sides. And so, I had hoped, and I advised, that we not start this process of expanding NATO for that reason.

 

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ambassador Matlock, could you explain what at the time, following the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union — what was the justification at all for the continuation of NATO, especially following the end of the Warsaw Pact, the dissolution of that defense agreement?

 

JACK MATLOCK: Well, to put it bluntly, there were three purposes of NATO to begin with. As the first secretary general, British Lord Ismay, stated, NATO was to keep the Russians out, to keep the Germans down, to keep the Americans in. So, when it was no longer necessary to keep the Russians out, many of us thought that it was important to keep the German military integrated, and so that in the future you wouldn’t risk some breakout, as had happened earlier. And we thought it important to keep the United States as a part of European security to ensure the stability. So, I certainly approved at the time the continuation of the NATO that existed at the end of the Cold War; however, I thought it should be integrated into an overall European security organization that included Russia, the East Europeans and the other states that had been in the Soviet Union. And we actually had plans for that at the time through a proposal called the Partnership for Peace, which could include them all. And we also had an organization, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which included all the European countries, and it could have been beefed up in many respects. And in that case, we could have kept the old NATO but built other security arrangements.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/2/17/jack_matlock_ukraine_russia_nato_us

 

MEANWHILE:

 

A newly discovered document from March 1991 shows US, UK, French, and German officials discussing a pledge made to Russia that NATO will not expand to Poland and beyond. Its publication by the German magazine Der Spiegel on Friday proves Moscow right and NATO wrong on the matter. 

The minutes of a March 6, 1991 meeting in Bonn between political directors of the foreign ministries of the US, UK, France, and Germany contain multiple references to “2+4”talks on German unification in which the West made it “clear” to the Soviet Union that NATO will not expand past the eastern borders of Germany.

“We made it clear to the Soviet Union – in the 2+4 talks, as well as in other negotiations – that we do not intend to benefit from the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe,” the document quotes US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Canada Raymond Seitz.

“NATO should not expand to the east, either officially or unofficially,” Seitz added. 

A British representative also mentions the existence of a “general agreement” that membership of NATO for eastern European countries is “unacceptable.”

“We had made it clear during the 2+4 negotiations that we would not extend NATO beyond the Elbe,” said West German diplomat Juergen Hrobog. “We could not therefore offer Poland and others membership in NATO.”

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/549921-nato-expansion-russia-document/

 

 

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