The Japanese island of Okinawa has 32 military installations, from which Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq have been attacked by the United States. Today, the principal target is China, with whom Okinawans have close cultural and trade ties.
There are military aircraft constantly in the sky over Okinawa; they sometimes crash into homes and schools. People cannot sleep, teachers cannot teach. Wherever they go in their own country, they are fenced in and told to keep out.
A popular Okinawan anti-base movement has been growing since a 12-year-old girl was gang-raped by US troops in 1995. It was one of hundreds of such crimes, many of them never prosecuted. Barely acknowledged in the wider world, the resistance has seen the election of Japan's first anti-base governor, Takeshi Onaga, and presented an unfamiliar hurdle to the Tokyo government and the ultra-nationalist prime minister Shinzo Abe's plans to repeal Japan's "peace constitution."
The resistance includes Fumiko Shimabukuro, aged 87, a survivor of the Second World War when a quarter of Okinawans died in the American invasion. Fumiko and hundreds of others took refuge in beautiful Henoko Bay, which she is now fighting to save. The US wants to destroy the bay in order to extend runways for its bombers. "We have a choice," she said, "silence or life." As we gathered peacefully outside the US base, Camp Schwab, giant Sea Stallion helicopters hovered over us for no reason other than to intimidate.
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 has been built one of the most provocative military bases in the world, less than 400 miles from Shanghai. The fishing village of Gangjeong is dominated by a South Korean naval base purpose-built for US aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and destroyers equipped with the Aegis missile system, aimed at China.
A people's resistance to these war preparations has been a presence on Jeju for almost a decade. Every day, often twice a day, villagers, Catholic priests and supporters from all over the world stage a religious mass that blocks the gates of the base. In a country where political demonstrations are often banned, unlike powerful religions, the tactic has produced an inspiring spectacle.
One of the leaders, Father Mun Jeong-hyeon, told me, "I sing four songs every day at the base, regardless of the weather. I sing in typhoons -- no exception. To build this base, they destroyed the environment, and the life of the villagers, and we should be a witness to that. They want to rule the Pacific. They want to make China isolated in the world. They want to be emperor of the world."
I flew from Jeju to Shanghai for the first time in more than a generation. When I was last in China, the loudest noise I remember was the tinkling of bicycle bells; Mao Zedong had recently died, and the cities seemed dark places, in which foreboding and expectation competed. Within a few years, Deng Xiopeng, the "man who changed China," was the "paramount leader." Nothing prepared me for the astonishing changes today.
China 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 Little Red Book and your plastic bust of Mao into the embrace of Starbucks, Apple, Cartier, Prada.
Would Mao be shocked? I doubt it. Five years before his great revolution in 1949, he sent this secret message to Washington. "China must industrialize," he wrote, "this can only be done by free enterprise. Chinese and American interests fit together, economically and politically. America need not fear that we will not be co-operative. We cannot risk any conflict."
Mao offered to meet Franklin Roosevelt in the White House, and his successor Harry Truman, and his successor Dwight Eisenhower. He was rebuffed, or willfully ignored. The opportunity that might have changed contemporary history, prevented wars in Asia and saved countless lives was lost because the truth of these overtures was denied in 1950s Washington, "when the catatonic Cold War trance," wrote the critic James Naremore, "held our country in its rigid grip."
The fake mainstream news that once again presents China as a threat is of the same mentality.
The world is inexorably shifting east; but the astonishing vision of Eurasia from China is barely understood in the West. The "New Silk Road" is a ribbon of trade, ports, pipelines and high-speed trains all the way to Europe. The world's leader in rail technology, China is negotiating with 28 countries for routes on which trains will reach up to 400 kms an hour. This opening to the world has the approval of much of humanity and, along the way, is uniting China and Russia.
"I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being," said Barack Obama, evoking the fetishism of the 1930s. This modern cult of superiority is Americanism, the world's dominant predator. Under the liberal Obama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, nuclear warhead spending has risen higher than under any president since the end of the Cold War. A mini nuclear weapon is planned. Known as the B61 Model 12, it will mean, says General James Cartwright, former vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that "going smaller [makes its use] more thinkable."
In September, the Atlantic Council, a mainstream US geopolitical think tank, published a report that predicted a Hobbesian world "marked by the breakdown of order, violent extremism [and] an era of perpetual war." The new enemies were a "resurgent" Russia and an "increasingly aggressive" China. Only heroic America can save us.
There is a demented quality about this war mongering. It is as if the "American Century" -- proclaimed in 1941 by the American imperialist Henry Luce, owner of Time magazine -- has ended without notice and no one has had the courage to tell the emperor to take his guns and go home.
John Pilger's film, The Coming War on China, is released in UK cinemas and will be broadcast on the ITV Network on 6 December at 10:40 pm. https://newint.org/ www.johnpilger.com
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