How the Pentagon and American bases pollute and control humanity

We Americans are champions to produce and sell shit.

Photo: AP photo

Richard Brooks

By Nicolas Bonnal

Vladimir Putin has reminded us how our planet is covered with American bases. We are told that Russia is a great peril in Europe, yet this peril depends on the American bases and matrix which nourish the imaginative risk of the Russian bear. Poland and Baltic countries, other places in Europe are now fanaticized against Russia because our information, our culture, our military are controlled by maddened American imperialism. We perfectly know thank to Mr Ulfkotte that the American CIA controls the great media in Europe and bribes the most famous journalists. The elite in France or elsewhere have sold their soul (if they had one!) to American corporations, and this cause explains scandalous and secret TTIP.

American bases sprawling around the world like cancer

But I want to remind the importance of American bases that have sprawled like cancer, virus or insects all around the world. Before the last war, there were 14 American military settlements the world. After the war, they were 30 000. Now there are around 200 bases around the world, involving more than 100 000 soldiers. One may think that it is not so important. But the impact of these bases is enormous on our life and behaviour. These bases are the experiment laboratories of our 'hallucinated' (Kunstler) way of life.

Let us read courageous authoress Catherine Lutz in her co-authored book on American bases:

"While the bases are literally barracks and weapons depots and staging areas for war-making and ship repair facilities and golf courses and basketball courts, they are also political claims, spoils of war, arms sales showrooms, toxic industrial sites, laboratories for cultural miscommunication, and collections of customers for local bars, shops, and prostitution."

Also read: Russia to revive army bases in three oceans

One spoke of 50 000 prostitutes in South Korea in the fifties. This unlucky country will never be reunified thanks to American interventionism and pestilential presence. This is the problem indeed: charging a poor country or a vassal one (like Germany or Japan definitively vanquished and occupied since 1945) with a fiscal, moral and physical plague.
Add Mrs Lutz:

 "Some communities pay the highest price: their farm land taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supplies, their neighbours imprisoned, tortured, and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on U.S. military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases."

The bases never reinforced security around the world. It is the contrary that occurs, like in a good old mafia movie (the myth of the protector...):

"The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous and, despite Pentagon claims that the bases simply provide security to the regions they are in, most of the world's people feel anything but reassured by this global reach."

American cigarettes and chewing gum colonize the world

The bases reinforced many dictators around the world, like Suharto in Indonesia, Franco in Spain or Marcos in Filipinos (a country whose resistance was exterminated at the end of the nineteenth century). So the democratic pretext quoted by Merkel to justify Western aggression against Russia is just a bark or a joke:

"Less well known is that these training programs strengthen the power of military forces in relation to other sectors within those countries, sometimes with fragile democracies, and they may include explicit training in assassination and torture techniques. Fully 38 percent of those countries with U.S. basing were cited in 2002 for their poor human rights record."

Many nations, poor or impoverished by the western wars, were thus easily colonized by American cigarettes, dollars, donuts, chewing gum. Where I live in Spain, people remember lost nuclear devices left by American troops (during the Cold War) or a gruesome gastronomic colonization, especially during the shooting of legendary Lawrence of Arabia. Troops or crew throwing candies to children discovered then the best way to possess a country. Kids get obesity and caries, the fascist or post-fascist elite get the dollars.

Another American writer, Joseph Gerson, remarks in this book the sinister dietetic mutation in Okinawa. This legendary base, which produces an incalculable number of nuisances, was also referenced by world-famous scholar Chalmers Johnson.

And this is what happens when you are an occupied country:

"Today in Naha, Okinawa's capital, people spend 46 percent more on hamburgers than people do in other Japanese prefectural capitals. They spend 60 percent more on bacon, and 300 percent more on processed meats, while spending 49 percent less on salad and 71 percent less on sushi."

Thanks to the American bases and pentagonal frozen madness, the Okinawans today threaten China. So they can be exterminated thanks to these American bases. But don't worry about the fate of these unlucky people: even in peace time their health is threatened by the American Way of Death: Okinawan men's longevity has fallen to 26th among Japan's 47 prefectures.

Mr Gerson recalls the origins of American independence, based on the refusal of British troops and expensive bases. Sardonically he adds then:

"Today the "abuses and usurpations" are far more intrusive and destructive than those that fuelled the U.S. war of independence. They include more than rape, murder, sexual harassment, robberies, seizure of people's lands, destruction of property, and the cultural imperialism that have accompanied foreign armies since time immemorial."

These American authors remember the famous rape of a teenager girl in the nineties in Okinawa or the infamous killing of twenty Italian skiers at the same period.  In his book Blowback, Mr Johnson speaks of thousands of crimes committed in Okinawa alone.

And the nuisance of the American bases is of course linked to the military, not only the cultural:

"They now include terrorizing jet blasts of frequent low altitude and night-landing exercises, helicopters and warplanes crashing into homes and schools, and the poisoning of environments and communities with military toxics; and they transform "host" and communities into targets for nuclear as well as for "conventional" attacks."

It is the Pentagon, not America, that controls humanity

Another important American author is Nick Turse. Nick Turse explores how the industrial complex of the United States military has pervaded the everyday lives of Americans. Turse investigates the relationship between the Pentagon and the Hollywood entertainment industry, military actions in the civilian sphere, and joint projects between the U.S. military and companies including NASCAR and Marvel Comics. Turse describes how military tacticians and flyers were outfitted with Apple PowerBooks. He illustrates how the military has attempted innovative methods to reach out to and recruit contemporary youth, including making "friends" on MySpace. Mr Turse speaks too of a military doughnuts complex and of the repugnant role of Starbucks' cafés; and of course of the military-cinematographic complex of Hollywood and its renowned school of 'transformers'...

It is not America which controls humanity and perverts her. It is directly the Pentagon, whose giant targets are now Russia and China.

I let conclude Gore Vidal, who explained in his book on perpetual war:

"We complain of terrorism, yet our empire is now the greatest terrorist of all. We bomb, invade, subvert other states. Although We the People of the United States are the sole source of legitimate authority in this land, we are no longer represented in Congress Assembled. Our Congress has been hijacked by corporate America and its enforcer, the imperial military machine."

Nicolas Bonnal