“Using rare archive and remarkable interviews with witnesses,
Pilger’s film discloses America’s secret history in the region - the
destruction wrought by the equivalent of one Hiroshima every day for 12
years, and the top secret ‘Project 4.1’ that made guinea pigs of the
population of the Marshall Islands,” a press release
for the film says. “In key interviews from Pentagon war planners to
members of China’s confident new political class, who rarely feature in
Western reports, Pilger’s film challenges the notion and propaganda of
China as the ‘new enemy’ of the United States.”
It’s a topic Pilger has covered before. “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,” Pilger recently wrote. He goes on to detail how local communities are resisting U.S. naval buildup, a topic also covered in the documentary:
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”.
