Well, everyone's entitled to their opinion, but from where I'm sitting Pilger is a multi-award-winning journalist and documentary film maker who has been covering wars and injustice since Vietnam in the sixties, while - no offence - but you're a guy on a chat forum with a rather peculiar taste in moviesVengeful Glutton wrote:http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40376673rowan wrote:Yes, another great documentary film from multi-award winning Australian journalist John Pilger. Much of the film is based on the plight of the natives of the Marshall Islands, which the US seized from Japan in WWII and proceeded to spend 12 years testing nuclear bombs on. The bikini is actually named after the explosions, not the island. The US tested the effects on animals, and also allowed the native population to return much too early, then proceeded to conduct tests on them. Many of the islanders died of cancer, while miscarriages, stillborn births and horribly deform babies rose sharply. At one point Greenpeace was required to deport the entire population off the islands. The survivors have little doubt that they, too, were used as guinea pigs. America, which spends trillions of dollars on arms, eventually offered them 150 million in compensation, but as of yet that hasn't been fully paid. The US continues to use the islands for missile tests, with each missile itself worth around 100 million dollars. Meanwhile, now that it is safe, military staff and their families live a life of luxury with beach-front homes, golf courses and swimming pools, while the natives live in squalor on a neighbouring island, permitted only to set foot on Bikini Island to earn a meagre living as cleaners, maids, gardeners and other menial laborers. To this point the film resembles a previous documentary by Pilger on the Chagos Island natives - 'Stealing a Nation - who were forced to leave their homeland to make way for the American military base of Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean (about as far away from the US as you can get). But then the bigger picture is exposed as Pilger explains how the US has come to impose hegemony over the entire Pacific region. Since WWII it has maintained a controversial base just a few hundred miles from China on the Japanese island of Okinawa, of course (which is surely the equivalent of the Soviets putting missiles on Cuba). The locals are against their presence, and there have also been a number of high profile cases of rape committed by American soldiers. Meanwhile, the US has also been increasing its military presence in the Philippines, according to Pilger, although this is disputed by American officials. Regardless, there can be no doubt the objective is to pen the Chinese in, just as NATO bases in Europe and the Middle East have done the same to Russia & Iran. But what exactly is the threat from China? Aside from long-standing claims over Tibet and Taiwan, they've shown no inclination for territorial expansion and invasion of other countries. And while it may be a one party state, it is pointed out there has been more political change in China since WWII than there has been in the US - because billionaires cannot manipulate the state party the way they do the two major political parties in the US. China is a market economy and now the world's second largest economy. In recent decades it has lifted almost half its population out of povery (600 million people), and created more billionaires than America. But the 'Yellow Peril' propaganda continues. This all began during the Opium Wars, of course, when the US was very much in league with the British in imposing the trade on the Far East. It funded the American industrial revolution, and in fact Franklin Delano Roosevelt's own grandfather made the family fortune from the trade. When the Chinese rebelled, they were put down savagely. And it was foreign invasions and interference which ultimately brought about the Communist Revolution, so despised by the West.rowan wrote:Looking forward to this one: https://putlocker.rs/watch/the-coming-w ... q03/5v8zjv
John Pilger’s terrific new film The Coming War on China begins with stills from 抗日战争 (Or World War II, if you like) and then cuts to General Franklin Blaisdell, former Reagan JCS and Rumsfeld shill, who delivers a Pentecostal eulogy on American military prowess and the impregnable force of Full Spectrum Dominance. The great landmass of China sits between Blaisdell’s hyperventilation and a trailer for The Mask of Fu Manchu, a striking modernist 1932 race-baiter which shows the infamous Chinese mastermind (Karloff, hissing his lisp) practicing surgical torture on the white man from his golden redoubt. Medical experiments haunt Pilger’s film. Washington’s war on China can itself be seen as a Western medical project undertaken to isolate the yellow virus. From the postwar US hire of Japanese doctors from the horrific Unit 731 to the American whitecoats who measured the nuclear effects on the Marshall Islanders, the philosophy of knife and microbe has driven the military-biological vision of wild teeming Asia.
Unluckily for the Marshall Islands, they are situated midway between the pacific coast of the United States and China. Pilger begins on the Bikini Atoll and the testing of H-bomb Bravo in 1946. Some of the darkest artifacts of The Coming War are the ruthless PSAs and army training films that show doctors scrutinizing the Islanders’ dying: measuring discolored patches, pulling out hair as if it were fuzz from a lapel, drawing blood and following the movements of the eye. Lessons in nuclear delousing – little girls used the fallout for shampoo – courtesy of the US Atomic Energy Commission. The ‘savages’ are occasionally taken back to the States for further testing, to ‘white man’s country and the iron room’ where Geiger and scintillation counters dip madly into the red. Dressed in snazzy suits, the Marshallese smile at the cameras while the experts watch their deaths and entrances with great devotion. Genetic mutations fascinate the white doctors. Signs back on the islands advertise ‘Free Plutonium Screening’. Pilger gives us portraits of magicians such as Dr. Robert Conard, the kindly AEC whitecoat with his warmth for children and his conscientious letters to the guinea pigs he has been monitoring impartially for years.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/23 ... iron-room/
Pilger's a lefty liberal fruitcake, but I did like that documentary. He did another very good one about the aborigines in Arnhem land, who were re-located ostensibly to eradicate systematic child abuse. Turned out that the allegations were fabricated; the Australian state were really interested in the mineral wealth the locals were sitting on.
So I think I'll go with Pilger on this. & since I had some training in journalism myself, and worked in the industry for a while, I think I can judge these matters well enough. I'm not aware of any of his allegations regarding Arnhem Land being fabricated. If you have any evidence of this, I'd be interested in looking at it. I've seen the documentary you refer to, and recall he did a pretty convincing job of demonstrating the government's relocation of Aboriginal communities had more to do with allowing the big mining companies to move onto their lands. I'd also recommend Utopia, if you haven't seen it yet.
