JOHN PILGER: Visiting Britain’s Political Prisoner

JOHN PILGER: VisitingBritain’s Political Prisoner

November 29, 2019 • 33 Comments 

“I think I’m going out of my mind,” Julian Assange told John Pilger at Belmarsh Prison. “No you’re not,” Pilger responded. “Look how you frighten them, how powerful you are.”

By John Pilger

I set out at dawn. Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh is in the flat hinterland of south east London, a ribbon of walls and wire with no horizon. At what is called the visitors centre, I surrendered my passport, wallet, credit cards, medical cards, money, phone, keys, comb, pen, paper.

I need two pairs of glasses. I had to choose which pair stayed behind. I left my reading glasses. From here on, I couldn’t read, just as Julian couldn’t read for the first few weeks of his incarceration. His glasses were sent to him, but inexplicably took months to arrive.

There are large TV screens in the visitors centre. The TV is always on, it seems, and the volume turned up. Game shows, commercials for cars and pizzas and funeral packages, even TED talks, they seem perfect for a prison: like visual valium.

I joined a queue of sad, anxious people, mostly poor women and children, and grandmothers. At the first desk, I was fingerprinted, if that is still the word for biometric testing.

“Both hands, press down!” I was told. A file on me appeared on the screen.

I could now cross to the main gate, which is set in the walls of the prison. The last time I was at Belmarsh to see Julian, it was raining hard. My umbrella wasn’t allowed beyond the visitors centre. I had the choice of getting drenched, or running like hell. Grandmothers have the same choice.

At the second desk, an official behind the wire, said, “What’s that?”

“My watch,” I replied guiltily.

“Take it back,” she said. 

So I ran back through the rain, returning just in time to be biometrically tested again. This was followed by a full body scan and a full body search. Soles of feet; mouth open.

At each stop, our silent, obedient group shuffled into what is known as a sealed space, squeezed behind a yellow line. Pity the claustrophobic; one woman squeezed her eyes shut.

We were then ordered into another holding area, again with iron doors shutting loudly in front of us and behind us.

“Stand behind the yellow line!” said a disembodied voice.

Belmarsh prison, where Assange is incarcerated.

Another electronic door slid partly open; we hesitated wisely. It shuddered and shut and opened again. Another holding area, another desk, another chorus of, “Show your finger!”

Then we were in a long room with squares on the floor where we were told to stand, one at a time. Two men with sniffer dogs arrived and worked us, front and back.

The dogs sniffed our arses and slobbered on my hand. Then more doors opened, with a new order to “hold out your wrist!” 

A laser branding was our ticket into a large room, where the prisoners sat waiting in silence, opposite empty chairs. On the far side of the room was Julian, wearing a yellow arm band over his prison clothes.

The Coming War on China: A Review of John Pilger’s Latest Documentary

By Jeremy R. Hammond | Sep 27, 2017 | Asia Pacific, Editor's Picks, Politics, Viewpoints | 4  |     

John Pilger’s film ‘The Coming War on China’ should be viewed by anyone concerned about the world's greatest threat to peace: the US government.

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hina, we are told by US government officials and the parroting establishment media, has been aggressively attempting to expand its territory by taking over islands in the South China Sea. China, we are told, is a threat to peace.

It’s true, veteran journalist John Pilger concedes in the opening of his latest documentary film, The Coming War on China, that China has been trying to claim disputed territories in the South China Sea. But if this makes China a threat to peace, what does it make the US but the most aggressive and warmongering threat—not only to peace but to life on Earth itself—that has ever existed?

Pilger helps put things into proper perspective by presenting a map showing the locations of all the military bases the US has surrounding China, which of course raises the question: Who is really threatening whom?

A considerable portion of the film is dedicated to reminding us how the US engaged in its own territorial conquest in the Pacific during World War II. Having taken control of the Marshall Islands, for over a decade following the end of that war and through the initial years of the so-called “Cold War” with the Soviet Union, the US used this tropical paradise as a testing ground for its nuclear weapons.

Confronting China: an Interview with John Pilger

OCTOBER 28, 2016

Confronting China: an Interview with John Pilger

by T.J. COLES

TJC: Please tell us about your new film, The Coming War on China.

JP: The Coming War on China is my 60th film and perhaps one of the most urgent. It continues the theme of illuminating the imposition of great power behind a facade of propaganda as news. In 2011, President Obama announced a ‘pivot to Asia’ of US forces: almost two-thirds of American naval power would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific by 2020.

The undeclared rationale for this was the ‘threat’ from China, by some measure now the greatest economic power. The Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter, says US policy is to confront those ‘who see America’s dominance and want to take that away from us’.

The film examines power in both countries and how nuclear weapons, in American eyes, are the bedrock of its dominance. In its first ‘chapter’, the film reveals how most of the population of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific were unwittingly made into nuclear guinea pigs in a programme whose secrets – and astonishing archive – are related to the presence of a missile base now targeting China. The Coming War on China will be released in cinemas in the UK on December 1st and broadcast on ITV (in the UK) on December 6th.

TJC: How do you assess Australia’s role in America’s ‘Pivot to Asia’?

JP: Australia is virtually the 51st state of the US.  Although China is Australia’s biggest trader, on which much of the national economy relies, ‘confronting China’ is the diktat from Washington. The Australian political establishment, especially the military and intelligence agencies, are fully integrated into what is known as the ‘alliance’, along with the dominant Murdoch media. I often feel a certain sadness about the way my own country – with all its resources and opportunities – seems locked into such an unnecessary, dangerous obsequious role in the world. If the ‘pivot’ proceeds, Australia could find itself fighting, yet again, a great power’s war.

TJC: With regards to the British and American media, how can the US get away with selling China as a threat when it is encircling China?

JP: That’s a question that goes to the heart of modern-day propaganda. China is encircled by a ‘noose’ of some 400 US bases, yet the news has ignored this while concentrating on the ‘threat’ of China building airstrips on disputed islets in the South China Sea, clearly as a defence to a US Navy blockade.

ON THE BEACH 2017. THE BECKONING OF NUCLEAR WAR.By John Pilger

ON THE BEACH 2017. THE BECKONING OF NUCLEAR WAR.

4 August 2017

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.

La menace d’une guerre contre la Chine, un documentaire de John Pilger - FULL MOVIE

La menace d’une guerre contre la Chine, un documentaire de John Pilger

26 décembre 2016 1 commentaire GuerresRéseau International

Partager la publication "La menace d’une guerre contre la Chine, un documentaire de John Pilger"

La menace d’une guerre contre la Chine est le 60ème film de John Pilger réalisé pour ITV.

John Pilger révèle ce que les médias taisent, à savoir que la première puissance militaire du monde, les USA, et la deuxième puissance économique du monde, la Chine, deux puissances nucléaires, sont sur le sentier de la guerre.

Ce film de John Pilger est un avertissement autant qu’une histoire de résistance motivante.

Merci à Le Partage/Tlaxcala
Source: http://johnpilger.com/articles/new-john-pilger-film-the-coming-war-on-china

source: http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=19539

The Coming War on China by JOHN PILGER

DECEMBER 2, 2016

The Coming War on China

by JOHN PILGER

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When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of 6 August, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, unforgettably. When I returned many years later, it was gone: taken away, “disappeared”, a political embarrassment.

I have spent two years making a documentary film, The Coming War on China, in which the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency.  The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are in the northern hemisphere, on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China.

The great danger this beckons is not news, or it is buried and distorted: a drumbeat of mainstream fake news that echoes the psychopathic fear embedded in public consciousness during much of the 20^th century.

Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an “existential threat” to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs.

Assange: Clinton is a cog for Goldman Sachs & the Saudis (JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT)

TO WATCH THE VIDEO   Assange: Clinton is a cog for Goldman Sachs & the Saudis (JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT) Published time: 5 Nov, 2016 05:59   Edited time: 5 Nov, 2016 06:35 Get short URL Australian journalist and documentary maker John Pilger (L) and Julian Assange, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks © Reuters / Dartmouth Films Whistleblower Julian Assange has given one of his most incendiary interviews ever in a John Pilger Special, courtesy of Dartmouth Films, in which he summarizes what can be gleaned from the tens of thousands of Clinton emails released by WikiLeaks this year. John Pilger, another Australian émigré, conducted the 25-minute interview at the Ecuadorian Embassy, where Assange has been trapped since 2012 for fear of extradition to the US. Last month, Assange had his internet access cut off for alleged “interference” in the American presidential election through the work of his website. ‘Clinton made FBI look weak, now there is anger’ John Pilger:What's the significance of the FBI's intervention in this last week of the US election campaign in the case against Hillary Clinton? Julian Assange: If you go to the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America's political police. And the FBI demonstrated with taking down the former head of the CIA over classified information given to his mistress [that] almost no one was untouchable. The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that, "No one can resist us." But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI's investigation. So, there is anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak. Well, we have published quite a number of different sets of emails, so, about 33,000 of Clinton's emails while she was Secretary of State. They come from a batch of just over 60,000 emails. In those 60,000 emails, Clinton has kept about half, 30,000, to herself, and we have published about half. And then there are the Podesta emails we've been publishing. Podesta is Hillary Clinton's primary campaign manager. So, there's a thread that runs through all of these emails. There is quite a lot of "pay for play," as they call it – taking… giving access in exchange for money for many individual states, individuals and corporations – combined with the cover-up of Hillary Clinton's emails while she was Secretary of State has led to an environment where the pressure on the FBI increases. ‘Russian government not the source of Clinton leaks’