John Pilger - The New Rulers of the World

I was recently in the Marshall Islands, which lie in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, north of New Zealand and south of Hawaii. The geography is important; whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, Where is that? When I mention Bikini, their reference is the swimsuit. Few seem aware that the bikini was named after the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini atoll; its Paris designer hoped his unique creation would cause an explosion right round the world. Sixty-six nuclear bombs were exploded in the Marshall Islands: the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshimas every day for twelve years.

As my aircraft banked low over Bikini lagoon, the emerald water beneath me suddenly disappeared into a vast black hole, a deathly void. This is the crater left by the 1954 Hydrogen bomb known as Bravo. When I stepped out of the plane, my shoes registered unsafe on a Geiger counter. A breeze did not stir palms petrified in what appear as unworldly formations. There were no birds.

On my return journey to London, I picked up an American magazine, Womens Health, at the Honolulu airport. On the cover was a picture of a slim, smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit and the headline, You, too, can have a bikini body. In the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who also had truly bikini bodies: each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. All were impoverished, the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious power still rampant.

Memory is a staple of this book memory in a time of organised forgetting: of saturating pseudo-information and the truth inverted. In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in Prague and promised to help make the world free from nuclear weapons. This was front-page news. Obama has since approved plans for an arsenal of nuclear weapons costing $350 billion, an all-time record. This is not news.

Unleashed American generals reminiscent of those in Stanley Kubricks Dr. Strangelove now talk openly about nuclear war-gaming Putins Russia. One of them is a General Breedlove. He says repeatedly and without evidence that the Ruskies are massing and threatening. A barrage of similar accusations and threats is aimed increasingly at China. Perpetual war has become the jargon of those in the universities and media who describe themselves as liberal realists.

Since I wrote The New Rulers of the World these dangers have intensified as the current rulers believe their dominance is threatened. The machinations described in the chapter The Great Game, are now so pervasive that the encirclement and intimidation of nuclear-armed Russia is not contentious. Propaganda is the principal weapon at this stage; news is a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war. The Russian president is a pantomime villain who can be abused with impunity. The evil empire is coming to get us, led by another Stalin or, perversely, a new Hitler. Name your demon and let rip.

Among the drum-beaters there is the joie desprit of a class reunion. The liberal realists of the Washington Post are the same editorial writers who, in promoting an invasion of Iraq in 2003, declared the existence of Saddams weapons of mass destruction to be hard facts. As many as a million men, women and children died as a consequence, and their ruined society converted to a breeding place of fanatics now known as Islamic State.

In the Caucasus and Eastern Europe, the biggest military buildup since the Second World War is subjected to the most successful news blackout I can remember, along with Washingtons effective takeover of the Russian borderland in Ukraine and the role of neo-Nazi brigades in terrorising the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine.

If you wonder, wrote Robert Parry, how the world could stumble into World War Three much as it did into World War One a century ago all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason.