«Briser le mensonge du silence n’est pas une abstraction ésotérique mais une responsabilité urgente qui incombe à ceux qui ont le privilège d’avoir une tribune.» ~ John Pilger, journaliste et documentariste
Dans son film The Coming War on China, John Pilger raconte, entre autres, l’histoire des Îles Marshall où les Américains ont testé leurs engins atomiques à raison d’une bombe par jour de même intensité qu’à Hiroshima pendant 12 ans pour étudier l’impact sur les humains et l’environnement – films d’archives à l’appui.
Parenthèse
Cela me rappelle l’extinction des dodos à l’île Maurice :
C’est une expérience étrange que de se tenir devant le représentant d’une espèce disparue. Sauf que le dronte n’est pas mort comme les dinosaures voilà des millions d’années. Il y a trois cent cinquante ans encore, il était possible de voir sur l’île des drontes bien vivants. Le nom anglais dodo vient du portugais doudo qui signifie «stupide». Les marins portugais qui ont débarqué sur l’île Maurice où vivait ce volatile ont constaté qu’il n’avait absolument pas peur des bipèdes, qu’il n’avait jamais encore eu l’occasion de croiser. Il était donc très facile de le tuer. Pas besoin de piège, de lacet ni de fusil de chasse, il suffisait de s’approcher tranquillement et de l’assommer, ou de l’attraper et de lui tordre le cou. [...] Il vivait uniquement à l’île Maurice. C’est un phénomène qu’on retrouve partout dans le monde : certaines espèces se développent sur des îles isolées à l’exclusion de tout autre endroit. Le dodo n’ayant pas eu de prédateur avant l’arrivée des hommes, il avait perdu sa faculté de voler. Cet oiseau fut décimé en très peu de temps. À la fin du XVIe siècle, on rapporte encore la présence de nombreux spécimens sur l’île : deux siècles plus tard, il n’y en a plus. [...] L’espèce humaine n’est pas impliquée dans le phénomène de l’extinction des dinosaures pour la simple raison qu’elle n’existait pas encore. Ce sont les hommes qui ont fait disparaître de la terre l’oiseau «stupide».
~ Henning Mankell (Sable mouvant, Éditions du Seuil, septembre 2015; p. 240)
Fin de la parenthèse
Bien sûr, on a reproché à Pilger d’être anti-américain. Mais qui, au départ, a inventé la bombe atomique et l’a testée sur des populations inoffensives et vulnérables? Par la suite, d’autres pays ont imité les États-Unis, testé des bombes dans les océans et sur terre, et fabriqué et emmagasiné des armes nucléaires plus qu’il n’en faut pour détruire la planète au complet. En réalité, John Pilger brosse un portrait du nucléaire depuis le début jusqu’à nos jours, et nous avertit des dangers qui pèsent sur le monde entier, comme jamais auparavant. D’autant plus que Donald Trump promet d’investir davantage dans l’armement nucléaire...
Je ne suis ni américanophobe/phile ni sinophobe/phile. Pilger semble porter tout le blâme sur les Américains, mais j’estime que le péril est à la fois américain, chinois, nord-coréen, russe, etc., car en définitive tous les pays détenteurs d’armes nucléaires sont à égalité en matière d’inconscience, d’irresponsabilité et d’ignominie dans la course à la suprématie. Nous en sommes les otages. Il suffirait d’un tweet.
Une interview intéressante à propos du vrai journalisme en voie d’extinction :
Fake news and fake journalism
John Pilger’s Message to Donald Trump: “Leave the rest of the world alone”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3cf9EBZweI
The Coming War on China
John Pilger 2016 1:52:35
The Coming War on China is a warning that nuclear war is not only imaginable, but a ‘contingency,’ says the Pentagon. The greatest build-up of NATO military forces since the Second World War is under way on the western borders of Russia, and some 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and nuclear weapons. But these happenings are of course not reported as United States antagonism. Instead, there is a familiar drumbeat of war, the kind of the old “yellow peril,” a restoration of the psychology of fear that embedded public consciousness for most of the 20th century. The aim of this film is to break the silence, and as the centenaries of the First World War presently remind us, horrific conflict can begin all too easily. By recounting the secret and forgotten history of the rapacious actions of great power against China throughout the decades, such as the destruction of the Marshall Islands and the Opium wars, The Coming War on China is also a report of an inspiring popular resistance to nuclear weapons, military bases and warmongering of the United States, of which little is known in the West.
Film: https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-coming-war-on-china/
“The United States exploded 67 atomic bombs, nuclear weapons, between 1946 and 1958, leaving that part of the world gravely damaged – in human and environmental terms. And this assault on the Marshalls goes on. On the largest island, Kwajalein, there is an important and secretive US base called the Ronald Reagan Test Facility, which was established in the 1960s – as the archive we're using makes clear – to combat the threat from China.
The US has some 5,000 bases – 4,000 in the US itself and almost a thousand on every continent.
The aim of this film is to break a silence: the United States and China may be on the road to war, and nuclear war is no longer unthinkable.”
~ John Pilger
This new feature-length documentary by award-winning journalist and filmmaker John Pilger is his 60th film for television. Coming straight after the election of President Trump, the film is one of John Pilger's most timely and urgent investigations. As Trump threatens China with a trade war and worse, this film is both a warning and an inspiring story of people's resistance.
Filmed over two years in the Marshall Islands, Japan, Korea, China and the United States, The Coming War on China reveals a build-up to war on the doorstep of China. More than 400 US military bases now encircle China in what one strategist calls “a perfect noose”.
Bringing together rare archive and interviews with witnesses, Pilger reveals America's secret history in the region – the destruction of much of life in the Marshall Islands, once a paradise, by the explosion of the equivalent of one Hiroshima every day for 12 years, and the top secret 'Project 4.1' that made nuclear guinea pigs of the population.
Pilger and his crew chartered a plane to the irradiated island of Bikini where the 1954 Hydrogen Bomb poisoned the environment forever. He reports: “As my aircraft banked low over Bikini atoll, the emerald lagoon beneath me suddenly disappeared into a vast black hole, a deathly void. When I stepped out of the plane, my shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter. Almost everything was irradiated. Palm trees stood in unworldly formations, unbending in the breeze. There were no birds. It was a vision of what the world can expect if two nuclear powers go to war.”
In key interviews – from Pentagon war planners in what is now Donald Trump's Washington, where the undeclared strategy is “perpetual war”, to members of China's new political class who rarely feature in Western reports – Pilger's film challenges the notion of the world's newest, biggest trading nation as an enemy.
Edited in chapters, The Coming War is also about the human spirit and the rise of an extraordinary resistance in faraway places. On the Japanese island of Okinawa, home to 32 US bases - where the population lives along a razor-wired fenceline and beneath the screeching of military aircraft – Okinawans are challenging the greatest military power in the world, and succeeding.
One of the resistance leaders is Fumiko Shimabukuro, aged 87. A survivor of the Second World War, she took refuge in beautiful Henoko Bay, which she is now fighting to save. The Japanese government wants to fill in much of the bay to extend runways for US bombers. “For us,” she told me, “the choice is silence or life.”
Across the East China Sea lies the Korean island of Jeju, a semi- tropical sanctuary and World Heritage Site declared “an island of world peace”. On this island of world peace is one of the biggest military bases in Asia, aimed at China – purpose-built for US aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and missile destroyers.
For almost a decade the people of Jeju have been peacefully resisting the base. Every day, twice a day, farmers, villagers, priests and supporters from all over the world stage an extraordinary Catholic mass that blocks the gates. Every day, police remove the priests and the worshippers, bodily, and their altar. It is a silent, moving spectacle. One of the leaders, Father Mun Jeong-hyeon, says: “I sing four songs every day at the base. I sing in typhoons – no exception.”
From Jeju, Pilger flew to Shanghai. “When I was last in China,” he says, “the loudest noise I remember was the tinkling of bicycle bells; Mao Zedong had recently died, and the cities seemed dark, forbidding places. Nothing prepared me for the astonishing changes that had taken place.”
He interviews Lijia Zhang, a Beijing journalist and typical of a new class of outspoken mavericks. Her bestselling book has the ironic title, Socialism Is Great! She grew up during the chaotic and brutal Cultural Revolution and has lived in the US. A critic of her own country, she also rejects outdated stereotypes. “Many Americans imagine,” she said, “that Chinese people live a miserable, repressed life with no freedom whatsoever. The [idea of] the yellow peril has never left them... They have no idea there are some 500 million people being lifted out of poverty.”
China today presents exquisite ironies, not least the house in Shanghai where Mao and his comrades secretly founded the Communist Party of China in 1921. Today, it stands in the heart of a very capitalist shipping district; you walk out of this Communist shrine with your plastic bust of Mao into the embrace of Starbucks, Apple, Cartier.
Eric Li, a Shanghai venture capitalist and social scientist, tells Pilger: “I make the joke: in America you can change political parties, but you can't change the policies. In China you cannot change the party, but you can change policies. The political changes that have taken place in China this past 66 years have been wider and broader and greater than probably any other major country in living memory.”
The world is shifting east, and America's dominance is ending. Once subjugated, scorned and impoverished, China is rising inexorably as the world's banker and builder. Will all this be allowed to happen peacefully? “We need to make America strong again,” says President-elect Donald Trump. “We need to make America great again ... and we need victories.”
Il suffirait d'un tweet...
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