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View Full Version : THE BECKONING OF NUCLEAR WAR



Loki
08-09-2017, 11:21 PM
http://johnpilger.com/media/images/JohnsPhoto.png

http://johnpilger.com/articles/on-the-beach-2017-the-beckoning-of-nuclear-war

The US submarine captain says, "We've all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you're never ready, because you don't know when it's coming. Well, now we do know and there's nothing to be done about it."

He says he will be dead by September. It will take about a week to die, though no one can be sure. Animals live the longest.

The war was over in a month. The United States, Russia and China were the protagonists. It is not clear if it was started by accident or mistake. There was no victor. The northern hemisphere is contaminated and lifeless now.

A curtain of radioactivity is moving south towards Australia and New Zealand, southern Africa and South America. By September, the last cities, towns and villages will succumb. As in the north, most buildings will remain untouched, some illuminated by the last flickers of electric light.

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

These lines from T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men appear at the beginning of Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach, which left me close to tears. The endorsements on the cover said the same.

Published in 1957 at the height of the Cold War when too many writers were silent or cowed, it is a masterpiece. At first the language suggests a genteel relic; yet nothing I have read on nuclear war is as unyielding in its warning. No book is more urgent.

Some readers will remember the black and white Hollywood film starring Gregory Peck as the US Navy commander who takes his submarine to Australia to await the silent, formless spectre descending on the last of the living world.

I read On the Beach for the first time the other day, finishing it as the US Congress passed a law to wage economic war on Russia, the world's second most lethal nuclear power. There was no justification for this insane vote, except the promise of plunder.

The "sanctions" are aimed at Europe, too, mainly Germany, which depends on Russian natural gas and on European companies that do legitimate business with Russia. In what passed for debate on Capitol Hill, the more garrulous senators left no doubt that the embargo was designed to force Europe to import expensive American gas.

Their main aim seems to be war - real war. No provocation as extreme can suggest anything else. They seem to crave it, even though Americans have little idea what war is. The Civil War of 1861-5 was the last on their mainland. War is what the United States does to others.

The only nation to have used nuclear weapons against human beings, they have since destroyed scores of governments, many of them democracies, and laid to waste whole societies - the million deaths in Iraq were a fraction of the carnage in Indo-China, which President Reagan called "a noble cause" and President Obama revised as the tragedy of an "exceptional people"He was not referring to the Vietnamese.

Filming last year at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, I overheard a National Parks Service guide lecturing a school party of young teenagers. "Listen up," he said. "We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom."

At a stroke, the truth was inverted. No freedom was defended. Freedom was destroyed. A peasant country was invaded and millions of its people were killed, maimed, dispossessed, poisoned; 60,000 of the invaders took their own lives. Listen up, indeed.

A lobotomy is performed on each generation. Facts are removed. History is excised and replaced by what Time magazine calls "an eternal present". Harold Pinter described this as "manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for universal good, a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis [which meant] 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."

Those who call themselves liberals or tendentiously "the left" are eager participants in this manipulation, and its brainwashing, which today revert to one name: Trump.

Trump is mad, a fascist, a dupe of Russia. He is also a gift for "liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics", wrote Luciana Bohne memorably. The obsession with Trump the man - not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system - beckons great danger for all of us.

While they pursue their fossilised anti-Russia agendas, narcissistic media such as the Washington Post, the BBC and the Guardian suppress the essence of the most important political story of our time as they warmonger on a scale I cannot remember in my lifetime.

On 3 August, in contrast to the acreage the Guardian has given to drivel that the Russians conspired with Trump (reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a "Soviet agent"), the paper buried, on page 16, news that the President of the United States was forced to sign a Congressional bill declaring economic war on Russia. Unlike every other Trump signing, this was conducted in virtual secrecy and attached with a caveat from Trump himself that it was "clearly unconstitutional".

A coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia.

This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the "national security" managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism. Martin Luther King called them "the greatest purveyors of violence in the world today".

They have encircled Russia and China with missiles and a nuclear arsenal. They have used neo-Nazis to instal an unstable, aggressive regime on Russia's "borderland" - the way through which Hitler invaded, causing the deaths of 27 million people. Their goal is to dismember the modern Russian Federation.

In response, "partnership" is a word used incessantly by Vladimir Putin - anything, it seems, that might halt an evangelical drive to war in the United States. Incredulity in Russia may have now turned to fear and perhaps a certain resolution. The Russians almost certainly have war-gamed nuclear counter strikes. Air-raid drills are not uncommon. Their history tells them to get ready.

The threat is simultaneous. Russia is first, China is next. The US has just completed a huge military exercise with Australia known as Talisman Sabre. They rehearsed a blockade of the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea, through which pass China's economic lifelines.

The admiral commanding the US Pacific fleet said that, "if required", he would nuke China. That he would say such a thing publicly in the current perfidious atmosphere begins to make fact of Nevil Shute's fiction.

None of this is considered news. No connection is made as the bloodfest of Passchendaele a century ago is remembered. Honest reporting is no longer welcome in much of the media. Windbags, known as pundits, dominate: editors are infotainment or party line managers. Where there was once sub-editing, there is the liberation of axe-grinding clichés. Those journalists who do not comply are defenestrated.

The urgency has plenty of precedents. In my film, The Coming War on China, John Bordne, a member of a US Air Force missile combat crew based in Okinawa, Japan, describes how in 1962 - during the Cuban missile crisis - he and his colleagues were "told to launch all the missiles" from their silos.

Nuclear armed, the missiles were aimed at both China and Russia. A junior officer questioned this, and the order was eventually rescinded - but only after they were issued with service revolvers and ordered to shoot at others in a missile crew if they did not "stand down".

At the height of the Cold War, the anti-communist hysteria in the United States was such that US officials who were on official business in China were accused of treason and sacked. In 1957 - the year Shute wrote On the Beach - no official in the State Department could speak the language of the world's most populous nation. Mandarin speakers were purged under strictures now echoed in the Congressional bill that has just passed, aimed at Russia.

The bill was bipartisan. There is no fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. The terms "left" and "right" are meaningless. Most of America's modern wars were started not by conservatives, but by liberal Democrats.

When Obama left office, he presided over a record seven wars, including America's longest war and an unprecedented campaign of extrajudicial killings - murder - by drones.

In his last year, according to a Council on Foreign Relations study, Obama, the "reluctant liberal warrior", dropped 26,171 bombs - three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day. Having pledged to help "rid the world" of nuclear weapons, the Nobel Peace Laureate built more nuclear warheads than any president since the Cold War.

Trump is a wimp by comparison. It was Obama - with his secretary of state Hillary Clinton at his side - who destroyed Libya as a modern state and launched the human stampede to Europe. At home, immigration groups knew him as the "deporter-in-chief".

One of Obama's last acts as president was to sign a bill that handed a record $618billion to the Pentagon, reflecting the soaring ascendancy of fascist militarism in the governance of the United States. Trump has endorsed this.

Buried in the detail was the establishment of a "Center for Information Analysis and Response". This is a ministry of truth. It is tasked with providing an "official narrative of facts" that will prepare us for the real possibility of nuclear war - if we allow it.

Kamal900
08-09-2017, 11:23 PM
Fallout New Vegas, here I come.

Loki
08-09-2017, 11:27 PM
Fallout New Vegas, here I come.

I'm honestly giving a thought to perhaps returning (temporarily) to South Africa. For a few years maybe, until things have stabilized (and IF they do... ). The southern hemisphere is the safest by far.

Drawing-slim
08-09-2017, 11:53 PM
Something more sinister is in motion here. North korea could strike first and they would lose but also they would bring an end to american superpower as we know it. Could very well be china, russia and iran using N,korea as their pawn to bring down United states.
What if north koera just starts shipping out its people to china right now every night then strike US in 3-6months with nuclear weapons. Just enough to kill 200k-400k people but to end american power forever. China and russia would immediately be in charge as new world order.

BeerBaron
08-10-2017, 12:05 AM
I'm honestly giving a thought to perhaps returning (temporarily) to South Africa. For a few years maybe, until things have stabilized (and IF they do... ). The southern hemisphere is the safest by far.


Try to get to Argentina if you can, but yeah the souther hemisphere is really the only safe place during a nuclear exchange, unless someone nukes australia.

TEUTORIGOS
08-10-2017, 12:25 AM
WWIII be all that you can be ! :



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOFf8iFsYbA



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKjua0KjKyo

"

Oh God I felt into War
I felt into the tears of the human race
A restless red river flowing through this world
Masters of War - Masters of Hate
Your names are tatooed upon my chest
Life has no value - Life is Death
Destroy it now and pay the rent
To rape and to kill is the only fucking law

Mass murder religion
Mass media corporation
Blood shall be spilled
There is no turning back
The end of your procession
Error in the program
All files will be erased

Give praise to your Guru
Follow him in Death and shut the fuck up

Poor lambs of God
Living meanly and voting obediently
Believing the lie
I want you dead

Total War - Death to all
World War Three
Dobermann Pinscher power
I'm the executioner
Domination then Destruction
Only solution

Glory to the blinds - World War Three
Total Genocide - World War Three
Collective Suicide - World War Three
You deserve to die - World War Three"

http://www.todayifoundout.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/tsar-bomba1.jpg

Drawing-slim
08-10-2017, 12:26 AM
Try to get to Argentina if you can, but yeah the souther hemisphere is really the only safe place during a nuclear exchange, unless someone nukes australia.It will never be a big scale nuclear war. They have small bombs to kill 40k people at the time to make a point. One side has to give in.

N1019
08-11-2017, 02:44 AM
I read On the Beach for the first time the other day, finishing it as the US Congress passed a law to wage economic war on Russia, the world's second most lethal nuclear power. There was no justification for this insane vote, except the promise of plunder.

The "sanctions" are aimed at Europe, too, mainly Germany, which depends on Russian natural gas and on European companies that do legitimate business with Russia. In what passed for debate on Capitol Hill, the more garrulous senators left no doubt that the embargo was designed to force Europe to import expensive American gas.

IF you accept that we're in competition by nature, discarding the utopian dream that we can and should all live together in harmony forever after, then what the US is doing is pretty rational. No doubt, were it some other people on top, they'd be doing the same, if not worse.

As I see it, there's no major hot war between the US and Russia in the near future. North Korea is part distraction and part bargaining chip with/proxy of China. Probably no war there, either. While I think the NK regime should be taken out, NK is a pain in the arse but not important enough at this juncture. The war focus is still the MENA region, where the lifeblood of the global economy and petrodollar system is based.

Loki
08-11-2017, 03:18 AM
IF you accept that we're in competition by nature, discarding the utopian dream that we can and should all live together in harmony forever after, then what the US is doing is pretty rational. No doubt, were it some other people on top, they'd be doing the same, if not worse.


I wouldn't go so far as to describe what they are doing as rational. Rather, very dangerous. I think we could have better "overlords". Too much arrogance...



As I see it, there's no major hot war between the US and Russia in the near future.

I wouldn't bet on it. We had the Cold War, which was dangerous from so many perspectives (even just taking errors into calculation... which could happen today too). The atmosphere we have today is the same, if not worse. But worryingly, there is an added recklessness in attitudes. We all may be caught off-guard. Many people are sounding the alarm, but the ones who can change things, and bring us back from the brink, are not interested. Instead they are interested in continuing escalation. It is already evident who history will judge if things go wrong. But that's of no comfort to anyone.

Wadaad
08-11-2017, 03:24 AM
I'm honestly giving a thought to perhaps returning (temporarily) to South Africa. For a few years maybe, until things have stabilized (and IF they do... ). The southern hemisphere is the safest by far.

Who is the 'refugee' now...

This is when the Southern Hemisphere really gets creative with their demands...

N1019
08-11-2017, 03:24 AM
I wouldn't go so far as to describe what they are doing as rational. Rather, very dangerous. I think we could have better "overlords". Too much arrogance...

I think waging economic war on national opponents is pretty rational compared to going straight to hot war, and better than proxy wars, too, because they still cause the deaths of millions (although the US and Russia are also doing that). It depends on your perspective. Economic warfare is very humane compared to carpet bombing and tactical nukes.




I wouldn't bet on it. We had the Cold War, which was dangerous from so many perspectives (even just taking errors into calculation... which could happen today too). The atmosphere we have today is the same, if not worse. But worryingly, there is an added recklessness in attitudes. We all may be caught off-guard. Many people are sounding the alarm, but the ones who can change things, and bring us back from the brink, are not interested. Instead they are interested in continuing escalation. It is already evident who history will judge if things go wrong. But that's of no comfort to anyone.

I'm not placing bets, but if we could have the cold war for over 40 years, I think we could have it again. The first cold war featured economic and proxy wars like the current "conflict". I mean, look at Korea - it is a holdover from that first cold war. It's unfinished business.

Loki
08-11-2017, 03:30 AM
I think waging economic war on national opponents is pretty rational compared to going straight to hot war,

... but the point is, economic warfare is still warfare, and it aims to significantly undermine the "enemy". The problem is that if the enemy cannot effectively retaliate in the same way, they will have to retaliate asymmetrically, which could mean militarily. So the end result is the same.

N1019
08-11-2017, 03:35 AM
... but the point is, economic warfare is still warfare, and it aims to significantly undermine the "enemy". The problem is that if the enemy cannot effectively retaliate in the same way, they will have to retaliate asymmetrically, which could mean militarily. So the end result is the same.

Yes, because humans compete for resources by nature. This is that same prehistoric, animalistic competition on a modern grand scale, and the economic measures are a pretty nice way of doing it. There's no escaping this competition, conflict, whatever you want to call it.

If the enemy takes the first military step in response to economic warfare measures, well, that's their choice. The better option would be to submit, but I can't see that happening, at least not from Russia or China. But anyway, does that mean a West vs Russia/China hot war in the near future? I don't think so. Their asymmetrical response is more likely to take the form of another proxy war, which is where smaller, weaker states come in.

With the weaker states like Iran and NK, the picture is different insofar as they act autonomously. If the sanctions don't work, as in the case of Iran, hot war is far more likely, and while Russia might offer aid it will not come to the rescue as such. NK is however effectively a proxy of China. Would China attack the US directly in response to an American attack on NK? I still doubt that. More likely, NK would be sacrificed on the altar of proxy wars, the conflict used to garner intelligence and test out each other's shit.