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.
Comment: Arrogance. Belligerence. Pathology. Aggression. Greed. Hubris. Predation. All these descriptors are now what makes the United States "special" in the eyes of China, Russia, Syria, Iran - and much of the rest of the world that hasn't been utterly ponerized by US-influence.