Silencing America as It Prepares for War by JOHN PILGER

[Silencing America as It Prepares for War | by JOHN PILGER | http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/27/silencing-america-as-it-prepares-for-war/ ]

Not only John Pilger is brilliant, he has impeccable timing. This fantastic piece could not come at more apt time than the Memorial Day, the time of a year when blind patriotism is celebrated around the BBQ grills of America.

The time of a year when a mere mention of the US military adventures around the globe is considered un-American and un-patriotic.

The time of a year when 'sobriety' on any level is not sought alas Pilger delivers in this article the mother of all 'Patriot Missiles', THE TRUTH, he writes for those who don't give the TRUTH a day off for 'Memorial Day".

Now if the function of a "memorial' is to preserve memory/memories, then perhaps on this day we should remember all aspects of US wars, perhaps we should remember the tragic impacts of US wars not only on our own soldiers but the innocent victims in all the other countries which have been affected and impacted by US aggression.

Perhaps we should remember that while the US lost 7,000 of his own she caused as many as million death in Iraq and Afghanistan, a ratio of 1:143, most of whom innocent civilians.

Just a brief samples of what Pilger delivers in this article;

“We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom. Now don’t you forget it.” So said a National Parks Service guide as I filmed last week at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He was addressing a school party of young teenagers in bright orange T-shirts. As if by rote, he inverted the truth about Vietnam into an unchallenged lie.

The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young minds, not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own lives. A friend of mine, a marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam, was often asked, “Which side did you fight on?”

A few years ago, I attended a popular exhibition called “The Price of Freedom” at the venerable Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The lines of ordinary people, mostly children shuffling through a Santa’s grotto of revisionism, were dispensed a variety of lies: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved “a million lives”; Iraq was “liberated [by] air strikes of unprecedented precision”. The theme was unerringly heroic: only Americans pay the price of freedom.

The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders but also for the resilience of an enduring silence about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of the members of the United Nations have felt Washington’s boot, overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal – Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

The breathtaking record of perfidy is so mutated in the public mind, wrote the late Harold Pinter, 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. It didn’t matter … “. Pinter expressed a mock admiration for what he called “a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Read the rest here..... http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/27/silencing-america-as-it-prepares-for-war/

Susan Nevens - 1 June 2016