JOHN PILGER Journalist R.I.P.
Amid all the institutional media bias against telling the truth I was interested in the worker’s co-operative model Pilger proposed for running a newspaper.
His solidarity with the constant protest of Marshall Islanders against US bases.
Pilger didn’t avoid taking sides, a partisan view.
He often left the contradictions revealed in his films to speak for themselves.
He was an ally of the dispossessed who stood for something other than fame, prestige and money.
He pointed to the terrible omissions of Western culpability in the wars of South-East Asia and Central America.
He covered stories of people rarely reported.
Some of his life achievements:
His film about the NHS made when he was 80 years old, The Dirty War On The NHS (2019). I recall those revealing scenes of “charity” healthcare in the US.
His news reel exposing Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge’s genocide in Cambodia. In 1979, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia, described the American bombing that had provided a catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot and showed the shocking human effects of the embargo. Pinger was bringing out the war crime that was the American war on Vietnam.
'Year Zero' was broadcast in some 60 countries, but never in the United States.
PBS called in a ‘journalistic adjudicator.’ Who gave it the thumbs down.
‘journalistic adjudicator. sounds like an Orwellian term.
His 1974 film described the flight and expulsion of almost a million Palestinians, who became refugees in their own land – at the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
On his return to film his 2002 documentary, he said:
‘What has changed is that the Palestinians have fought back. Stateless and humiliated for so long, they have risen up against Israel’s huge military regime, although they have no army, no tanks, no American planes and gunships or missiles… For [them], the overriding, routine of terror, day after day, has been the ruthless control of almost every aspect of their lives, as if they live in an open prison.’
He said the “curfews, controls, roadblocks and checkpoints governing their lives bear comparison with apartheid South Africa
Pilger became the youngest journalist to receive Britain’s highest award for journalism, Journalist of the Year. He was the first to win it twice.
Amongst Pilger’s various awards are the prestigious Sophie Prize for ’30 years of exposing injustice and promoting human rights.’
In 2009, he was awarded Australia’s human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize.
His final award was the Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award 2023, “For a lifetime of exposing injustice, afflicting the powerful and defending Press Freedom in his films, books and articles.
He marched “with America’s poor from Alabama to Washington, following the assassination of Martin Luther King,
Pilger also “helped galvanize support for the East Timorese,” then under Indonesian occupation. Such was the impact of his 1994 documentary and dispatches, reported from East Timor, where he travelled undercover.
Pilger reviewed Ken Burns’ hyped “event” of an American television series, ‘The Vietnam War’ whose biggest backer, Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese!
Burns said he was grateful to “the entire Bank of America family” which “has long supported our country’s veterans.”
The film is dishonest, it avoids The cynical fabrication of “false flags that led to the invasion of Vietnam, as it did the Iraq war.
There’s no mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans. a war in which General William Westmoreland, the American commander, referred to people as “termites”.
It legitimised US wars of aggression. The revisionism never stopped.
where in the village of My Lai, between 347 and 500 men, women and infants were murdered by American troops
(Burns prefers the word “killings”).
No different from the genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, the colonial massacres in the Philippines, the atomic bombings of Japan, and the levelling of every city in North Korea.
Quoting Robert Taber’s The War of the Flea, Lansdale said, “There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. This is the American Way!
A system of conquest and extremism.”
Pilger's various books about Australian press barons and millionaire organised gangsters, Murdoch, Abeles, their abuse of power, how they controlled information, he wrote about the coup against elected prime minister Gough Whitlam and corruption in his book ‘A Secret Country’ which revealed much of his own country’s ‘forgotten past’, especially its indigenous past and present.
ADDENDUM:
After some online discussions elsewhere about John pilger’s work, i am adding more thoughts of mine directly below here.
Further down are more of pilger’s thoughts, words, opinions and discussion.
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In saying, Putin was ‘The only leader to condemn fascism in Europe’, perhaps Pilger appeared, from a Western standpoint to be backing the ‘enemy,’ But He was criticising the hypocrisy of Western governments from an independent standpoint.
Instead of Relying on the selective eyes of Embedded journalists…with insular parochial news viewed from the wrong end of the telescope lens. (like a few other journalists who Exposed The U.S.A’s backing of Ukraine's extreme right-wing Svoboda party who use Nazi symbols.)
the massing of American-led Nato forces creeping on Russia’s western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941 when 27 million Russians died in Hitler’s invasion.
I don’t believe that my enemy’s enemy must be my friend. Or
My friends enemy must be my enemy.
I have denounced Russian imperialism, just as I denounce the imperialism of the USA and UK.
I shared John Pilger’s opinions, stories, views, his discussions and ideas about journalism because I’m interested, because he just died.
I don’t know how Putin’s demand for surrender could be interpreted as a genuine peace offer.
I oppose all aggressive dehumanising wars, regardless of who wages them.
I am not ‘happily’ colluding with fascist parties under the guise of an ‘anti-imperialist’ narrative.
Untruth and mistrust of all sides is still palpable for me.
rationalised by observing, reading and learning from what has happened in the past, USA. complicity, CIA, spy-cops, misinformation…
I ask Myself Is this what the death of internationalism looks like?
Do you not wish to believe that the western governments are capable of misinformation hiding facts and acting underhandedly for theirs and the mining and oil industries own gain?
I’m not out to alienate anyone but to share and learn.
I’m willing to be challenged and to be proved ‘wrong’.
I know I am lucky to have a right to express my opinions, however mistaken.
I’ve tried to remember and live by the motto, ‘If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression.’
I believe we have a duty to debunk and contest misleading justifications.
I’m listening.
So do you believe and support the fear mongering and stories that were told spread in the press by Bush, Rumsfeld, Clinton PR departments regarding the Iraq war, and Reagan and Kissinger before them, and you believe that the Russian Oligarchs didn't donate
Money to the Tory party buying favours and lordships?
Do You Maintain That the cuts to U.S. welfare were a great idea? That, while waging war on the poor, Reagan cut the highest income tax rate from 70% to 28%. You think that was admirable?
And you are confident
The Saudi kingdom has a wonderful human rights record for its people.
And Putin isn't a megalomaniac homophobic despot?
That there’s disinformation on all sides. That Putin’s sense of threat seems to have been heightened by Nato’s expansion and mission creep?
Do you believe the War Spin? Do you believe that US and British government and military forces didn’t set out to mislead and misinform the public during their war against Iraq—aided by hundreds of compliant “embedded” journalists?
Like ‘Saving Private Jessica’ which owed more to Hollywood myth making than reality?
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When we criticise or attack someone Context is everything- In Order to understand why they are saying something or why they are asking awkward and unpopular questions.
the only way anyone could have foreseen things that have happened was with hindsight…
Hindsight's a wonderful thing, I know… if we all had it there would be no history to write about!
Because I didn’t mention Stalin’s purges, doesn’t mean I forgot them or, by my omission, I pardoned Stalin.
Just as I didn’t mention many things such as-how US corporations helped Fascism…
I forgot to mention those Close ties between US businessmen and bankers and their German counterparts that had been forged in the years prior to Hitlers rise to power.
US loans by the Morgan and chase banking interests propping up the faltering German economy after the 20s. IBM, General Motors, anti semite racist Henry Ford motors, Farben, Du Pont,, Standadrd Oil, all helped the trains to Aushwitz run on time!
I also forgot to ask - Why did the US send troops to Dominican Republic far more freely than to Alabama where the racists held sway?
I forgot to quote Kissinger when he said, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”
I forgot to mention how much The USA cosy up to and finance countries with human rights records
Because those countries have minerals, copper and oil.
I forgot to mention how In El Salvador and Guatamala
Reagan’s ‘Freedom fighters’, routinely raped and tortured, mutilated and dismembered their victims.
Or I didn't mention
The Mai lai massacre and
When Raymond Bonner a journalist tried to expose what had occurred, other pro Reagan newspapers assaulted his credibility. His paper buckled under pressure and pulled Bonner out.
I didn’t mention Reagan’s scare tactics, saying, “We’re in greater danger today than we were the day after pearl harbour.”
How Defence spending increased by 51%, while 408,000 people lost their eligibility for aid to families, food stamps budget cut, school lunches, Medicaid, housing, while waging war on the poor Reagan cut the highest income tax rate from 70% to 28%.
How Reagan pointed at a Soviet civil defence program that didn’t exist.
I forgot to mention the USA‘s Sale to Iraq of Insecticides made by ‘Dow chemicals’ the manufacturer of Napalm.
I neglected to mention The the hypocrisy of the USA praising Soviet non-intervention while it was itself overthrowing governments.
I didn’t mention when Kuwait officials hired the worlds largest PR firm, Hill and Knowlton to sell the Iraq war…to manipulate public opinion. On October 10th at hearings sponsored by Congress’s human rights caucus, a 15 year old girl testified that she had been a volunteer in a Kuwait hospital, when Iraqui troops burst in. She described what she had witnessed: ‘They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the babies on the cold floor to die.” Bush cited the story repeatedly making case for war: “It turns your stomach to listen to the tales of those that have escaped the brutality off Saddam the invader. Mass hangings, babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor.”
It was later discovered that not only was the young witness lying about having been at the hospital, she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and a member of the ruling family. By the time the fraud was exposed, US bombing of Bagdad had already begun!
The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis", as if the truth "never happened even while it was happening".
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Here are Some quotes by Pilger in dialogue or from articles I’ve gathered to give, with hindsight, some perspective on Pilger’s views, stance, observations and opinions about recent history and news… news that became history. Also about journalism.
Before the salacious narcissistic, despotic, lying Trump became president, Pilger was comparing Trump to what Pilger called the ‘liberal elitist’ Hilary Clinton and her ‘aggressive foreign policies’, and what Pilger observed and compared was because Trump was being critical of US foreign policy at the time.
Pilger mentioned some questions that Trump alone had raised.
Among them: ‘Why is the United States "everywhere on the globe"? What is NATO's true mission? Why does the US always pursue regime change in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Ukraine?
Pilger observed that:
“Obama had placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. He had increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any US administration since the Cold War – having promised, in an emotional speech in the centre of Prague in 2009, to ‘help rid the world of nuclear weapons’.”
Pilger criticised the Democrats, Comparing Bill Clinton’s notorious welfare bills that broke world records in the number of mostly blacks they sent to jail.”
Pilger commented that:
'America’s 'liberal elitists’, democrats, looked down on the discontented working classes. They had refused to acknowledge, in their arrogance, the huge disaffection and discontent among ‘ordinary' people.’
What did Clinton call them?...”deplorables” and “irredeemable.”
"So,” Pilger says,
“that’s what happened here, in Brexit. I always felt that Brexit was a rebellion. It was a rebellion. It was people saying, 'We’re fed up with these arrogant elites, taking away our basic rights, ignoring us, not hearing us.”
"It was about impoverished people, people losing the very underpinning of their security and the security for their families. And that’s exactly true in the United States. You go to places like Kentucky where... in those ravaged coal areas, where the life expectancy, I read recently is less than that of Ethiopia. Alright, that may be right at the end of the spectrum. But, you know, it applies to all the states that Trump won. Pennsylvania, particularly, Ohio, and others.
Yeah, and that applied here in a different sense, but not really. It’s about... it’s about a rebellion. In the United States, there is a vacuum outside the establishment. I would say that both Clinton and Trump were extreme right-wing. That’s how I would describe them.”
Dennis Bernstein (DB) in an interview/conversation with Pilger =DB: “Well, it was a riveting moment, I guess you could say, when I think it was in a debate with Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton evoked, as one of her key advisors, Henry Kissinger.
JP: Yeah.
DB: That was pretty extraordinary, right?
JP: Yeah, well, you know as someone who should have been prosecuted a long time ago, has been wrong on practically everything anyway, I’m not surprised.
She is extreme right-wing. Trump is an extreme Populist right-wing. And we’re still to find out what that means.”
"Before Trump became president, he was never analyzed, and... that’s why there was a great surprise and a great shock.”
"There was a strand running through a lot of Trump’s speeches that sounded to me like a kind of America first, what they used to call isolationist politics. We’re going to deal with our people at home, we’re not going to spend the treasure overseas, especially in going to war with countries. “
"Trump may be a dangerous prospect too. We don’t know. Will he do as he said, as he said in his acceptance, victory speech? We will have relationships, we will not have conflict with other
countries, and all that. That could be just rhetoric. Trump is Mr. Rhetoric, so who knows?”
"Trump has said contradictory things on the Middle East. Very contradictory. He’s been bellicose, in one sense. But in another, he’s been... a thread that has run through Trump’s speeches, fairly consistently, and that is that he wants to do a deal with Russia. He doesn’t want to fight them.”
"But, you know, we never know if he meant it. He’s contradicted himself. So, now we’re about to find out.”
According to Pilger, "The Guardian had published "drivel" in covering the claims "that the Russians conspired with Trump".
Such assertions, he wrote, are "reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a 'Soviet agent’"
"Actually, Trump reminded us, in his acceptance speech that he had something like 200 generals and admirals... I suppose there must be a lot of generals and admirals, former ones anyway hanging about. But he had 200 of them. Hillary had a lot of them because the Pentagon-serving generals and admirals came out and demanded that Trump be beaten. Just as the CIA demanded that Trump be beaten. And the State Department demanded that Trump be beaten.”
"He’s building his own establishment but those... the old establishment will remain as powerful as it’s always been."
Pilger pointed out that 'Clinton's presidential campaign had received money from all but one of the world's 10 biggest arms companies. No other candidate came close.'”
“The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.
Hilary Clinton was the lead destroyer of a modern state, Libya. And as a result of that destruction–which she gloated, on camera, she gloated about the gruesome murder of Gaddafi–that destruction some 40,000 people died.”
Pilger said, "The idea that among certain liberal people that Hilary Clinton represented some kind of honourable alternative to the verbose and unpredictable Donald Trump is so absurd.”
"there was very little between Trump and Clinton."
“Trump, he’s anti-establishment, but that establishment isn’t going anywhere. And, yes, he will bring in his own establishment.”
"Clinton was said to represent an advance for women. She’s anything but. She’s a diametric opposite of that. Clinton, the Democrats were meant to be an advance for people of colour. Well, it was Clinton, the two Clintons, Bill and Hillary Clinton in the mid-90s, who devised the so-called welfare reforms that most historians, political historians, now agree were the trigger for sending so many
African-Americans into the gulag that is America’s prison system.”
"Without a shred of evidence, she (Hilary Clinton) has accused Russia of supporting Trump and hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public.”
"If the winner had been Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators would have celebrated her coronation as a great step forward for women. None would have mentioned Clinton’s victims: the women of Syria, the women of Iraq, the women of Libya."
“...an opposition is going to be needed. At present, there isn’t one, in my opinion. There was never an opposition to Barack Obama, a violent president, who seduced the media. It’s interesting that the more unpopular Donald Trump was made, with the media, all of them were against him, bar some Murdoch outlets and others. But most media was against him. I think that helped to give him support.”
"Indeed, the word class does not come up in the United States. We’re the upwardly mobile society. Everybody can make it. "
JP:
"Well, it didn’t. But it is,
you know, that’s what I mean by identity politics. Gender and race are separated from class. And it’s not who you are, or what the colour of your skin is, sometimes it is, perhaps often it is, but in the final analysis, it’s the power you serve. And that’s class.”
"Feminism should be part of class, all the time. Because it’s poor women who suffer most. And a lot of the people who voted for Trump were those women.
I read that, is it 52% of white women voted for him?”
“The media is held in such low regard by ordinary people. The so-called elites are held in such low regard by ordinary people. This is a class issue. There was a class issue running right through this campaign. And that has to be understood.”
“Under Obama, the US extended secret ‘special forces’ operations to 138 countries or 70 per cent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa. Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people worldwide.
According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day.”
“Trump’s views on immigrants and Muslims are grotesque, yet”, Pilger pointed out that, “the 'deporter-in-chief' of vulnerable people from America was not Trump but Obama, whose betrayal of people of colour is his legacy: such as the warehousing of a mostly Black prison population.
‘Liberal' Barack Obama deported more people than any other. “Obama and his administration, including Clinton, knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.”
“We in the West are now backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.
The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.”
“Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.”
“Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kyiv, with dozens of "special units" from the CIA and FBI setting up a "security structure" that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup.”
“Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing 41 people trapped inside.”
“A doctor described trying to rescue people, ‘but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate.’
In the US media, the Odesa atrocity has been played down as "murky" and a "tragedy" in which "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) attacked "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).
...the pogrom-like burning to death of ethnic Russians and others in Odesa... reawakened memories of Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine during World War Two. [Today] storm-like assaults on gays, Jews, elderly ethnic Russians, and other “impure” citizens are widespread throughout Kyiv-ruled Ukraine, along with torchlight marches reminiscent of those that eventually inflamed Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s...the police and official legal authorities do virtually nothing to prevent these neo-fascist acts or to prosecute them.”
“On the contrary, Kyiv has officially encouraged them by systematically rehabilitating and even memorialising Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi German extermination pogroms, renaming streets in their honour, building monuments to them, rewriting history to glorify them, and more.”“Liz Truss had blithely confused the countries of the Baltic and the Black Sea. In Moscow, she told the Russian Foreign Minister that Britain would never accept Russian sovereignty over Rostov and Voronezh — until it was pointed out to her that these places were not part of Ukraine but in Russia.
We might read the Russian press about the buffoonery of this pretender to 10 Downing Street and cringe.”
“This talk about World War 2 reminds me of how the Soviets beat Hitler while the US needlessly nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki and burned 100,000 civilians alive in Tokyo and then used its global narrative control to take credit for winning the entire war.”
“As Henry Kissinger once said: "It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but what is perceived to be true.”
Pilger didn’t ignore the fact that the UK’s business and political elite are closely intertwined with Russian oligarchs close to Putin. “London is the playground of the Russian elite, from familiar names like Roman Abramovitch to the less familiar, including Russia’s 3rd richest man Alisher Usmanov and oil baron Mikhail Fridman. It is estimated that
Russian oligarchs have given the Conservative party between £1.8-£3 million since 2010.”
Pilger was critical of the hypocrisy amongst news reporting and also pointed out ‘ injustices regarding truth and lies told, “that Tony Blair, a criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.”
“At least’ one million were killed in Iraq, or five per cent of the population.
The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the Western consciousness. ‘No one knows how many’ is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush — and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld etc, — were never in danger of prosecution.”
“Now China has matched America at its own ‘great game of capitalism – and that is ‘unforgivable.’ And China is suddenly the United States's new enemy.’
When the United States, the world’s biggest military power, decided that China, the second largest economic power, was a threat to its imperial dominance, two-thirds of US naval forces were transferred to Asia and the Pacific.
The restoration of imperial mythology demands, above all, a permanent enemy.
China has reportedly changed its nuclear weapons policies to first strike, as a direct consequence of this pressure from the United States.
In 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the South China Sea was a “security interest” of the United States.
China and the Philippines were then negotiating a dispute over the Spratly Islands – which was near to resolution.
Clinton urged Manila to take the issue to an international tribunal.”
Pilger: "China is surrounded by 400 US military bases; US naval forces are on the doorstep of China. US missiles are pointed at China from Okinawa and southern Korea.
There are no Chinese naval ships and no Chinese bases off California; there is no demonstrable Chinese military threat to the US, though China has made significant defensive preparations since Obama’s “pivot”.
Pilger: "Trump has continued Obama’s “pivot to Asia” policy. During the election campaign, Trump made threats to impose tariffs on Chinese imports but has not followed through.
The one significant change is the standoff over North Korea – which is very dangerous. The Trump administration has dismissed the proposal, agreed between China and North Korea and backed by Russia, that North Korea is prepared to negotiate- if the US and South Korea withdraw their fleets from North Korean waters.”
" Yes, of course, the world should be concerned about North Korea. But as international polls show, the world is more concerned about the US."
"The rise of China’s economy in a generation is phenomenal and barely understood in the West. The US elite – that is, those who have assumed power with the post 9/11 ascendancy of the Pentagon and the national security monoliths – regard American “dominance” of world affairs, especially Asia, as threatened by China’s economic rise.”
"Do you think war between the US and China is inevitable?"
Pilger: "Nothing is inevitable; but provocation can lead to miscalculation, mistake or accident, especially when “first strike” safeguards have been removed from the deployment of nuclear weapons.”
"Journalist, John Pilger, discusses the role of NATO in Europe and US imperialism
It has just been announced that Donald Trump will be attending the London NATO conference in December. “What kind of role do you think NATO is likely to be discussing in a Trump-led Western alliance?”
Pilger. “I’m not sure Trump is leading the NATO alliance; one day he hates NATO, the next he thinks it’s a good thing as long as it does what he wants.”
"On foreign policy, the EU is so weak and deferential – Germany aside – it’s impossible to say which American insanity will be adopted.”
"NATO likes to present itself as a force for peace and stability in the world. What is your assessment of the strategic role of NATO during the Cold War?”
Pilger: "NATO was, is, an American invention designed to impose American power on Europe. The Alliance achieved this during the Cold War and successfully spread the illusion – long debunked in declassified files – that Russia was a threat to all we hold dear.
Today, NATO exists as a provocateur to post-Soviet Russia, with its undeclared American goal of breaking up the Russian Federation.”
“Some of the Europeans running NATO’s war bureaucracy are as zealous as the Americans, such as the secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, a rabid propagandist.”
"Over the last twenty years, opposition to war has grown in Britain and in many parts of the world. What do you think is the significance of the movements against the West’s wars?”
PILGER: "The anti-war movement had its memorable successes during the 1980s when it effectively stopped the deployment of US medium-range nuclear weapons in Europe.
These were the heady days of Greenham Common
and a million people filling Manhattan for the Freeze Movement.
Since then, there hasn’t been an international movement. "
Some have praised Pilger for his journalistic integrity while making clear that they did not necessarily share his politics.
Pilger was accused, by Blairites, and pro-Iraq war journalists as being "anti-American, in that ‘he reflexively saw the United States as a malevolent actor in any conceivable situation.”
Despite the fact that the US has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.
“Militarism now rules. The Pentagon currently runs "special operations" – secret wars – in 124 countries.
On matters of war and peace, ministerial deceit is reported as news. Inconvenient facts are censored, and demons are nurtured.”
“Embedded Journalists who claimed the Iraq war was not a cover for American power or oil.
The right-wing press have said Pilger was usually quick to blame Western foreign policy for provoking terrorism – he referred to the 7/7 attacks in London in 2005 as ‘Blair’s bombs’ “
Dennis J Bernstein
DB: "And you did an excellent interview with Julian Assange. "
JP: 'Yeah, yeah. Interestingly, that interview with Julian Assange went out on, RT, Russia Today, and one of the reasons it did, well they did a good job of it, such a good job that it ended up with something like four million viewers. But no other broadcast, mainstream broadcast would take it. They have their own agendas. And that has to be understood by people. If you want to find out what is going on, you abandon the media as it’s presented to us. It’s unwatchable, it’s really just a product of enduring propaganda."
In 2003, Pilger filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist. Pilger recalled, "We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him (Lewis), ‘What if the constitutionally freest media in the world had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of spreading what turned out to be crude propaganda?’
to muddy the truth…”
He (Lewis) replied. ‘If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.’
"In other words,
had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul.
There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on 7th July 2005. There would have been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps.”
"When the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President Francoise Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria – and more terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollande’s bombast about France being “at war” and “showing no mercy”.
“That state violence and jihadist violence- feed off each other-
is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak.”
“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”
"The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West.
They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.
The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant.”
"The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an “agreement” that demanded the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy.
Milosevic was confronted by Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, who was to achieve infamy with her remark that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were "worth it".
Albright delivered an "offer" to Milosevic that no national leader could accept. Unless he agreed to the foreign military occupation of his country, with the occupying forces "outside the legal process", and
to the imposition of a neo-liberal "free market",
Serbia would be bombed.
His people were bombed, and he was prosecuted in The Hague.
Independence of this kind is intolerable.”
“All but a fraction of America's vaunted "precision-guided" missiles hit not military but civilian targets.
In 2008, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, revealed that she had been pressured not to investigate Nato's crimes.”
"At the height of the bombing, the BBC's Kirsty Wark interviewed General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander.
The Serbian city of Nis had just been sprayed with American cluster bombs, killing women, old people and children in an open market and a hospital.
Wark asked not a single question about this, or about any other civilian deaths. "
"The human rights record of Slobodan Milosevic was irrelevant to the West. Just as the human rights record of Saudi is ignored because they are business partners.
It’s Mafia doing deals with the mafia…or organised gangsters. The West’s medieval client, Saudi Arabia – to which the US and Britain sell billions of dollars worth of arms – is at present destroying Yemen, a country so poor that in the best of times, half the children are malnourished.
Look on YouTube and you will see the kind of massive bombs – “our” bombs – that the Saudis use against dirt-poor villages, and against weddings, and funerals.
The explosions look like small atomic bombs. The bomb aimers in Saudi Arabia work side-by-side with British officers.
This fact is not on the evening news."
"As WikiLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.
From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics – the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage.
Why is this not news? “
“The BBC's Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, said,
"There's no doubt that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially to the Middle East ... is now increasingly tied up with military power.”
"This obeisance to the United States and its collaborators as a benign force "bringing good" runs deep in Western establishment journalism. It ensures that the present-day catastrophe in Syria is blamed exclusively on Bashar al-Assad, whom the West and Israel
have long conspired to overthrow, not for any humanitarian concerns, but to consolidate Israel's aggressive power in the region.
The jihadist forces unleashed and armed by the US, Britain, France, Turkey and their "coalition" proxies serve this end.
It is they who dispense the propaganda and videos that becomes news in the US and Europe, and provide access to journalists and guarantee
a one-sided "coverage" of Syria.”
"On 21 July, French and American bombers attacked a government village in Aleppo province, killing up to 125 civilians.
This was reported on page 22 of the Guardian; there were no photographs.”
"Having created and underwritten jihadism in Afghanistan in the 1980s as Operation Cyclone - a weapon to destroy the Soviet Union - the US is doing something similar in Syria.”
"Like the Afghan Mujahideen, the Syrian "rebels" are America's and Britain's foot soldiers.
Many fight for al-Qaida and its variants; some, like the Nusra Front, have rebranded themselves to comply with American sensitivities over 9/11.
The CIA runs them, with difficulty, as it runs jihadists all over the world.”
"The nuclear risk is obvious, though suppressed by the media across "the free world".
The editorial writers of the Washington Post, having promoted the fiction of WMD in Iraq, demanded that Obama attack Syria."
"The immediate aim is to destroy the government in Damascus, which, according to the most credible poll (YouGov Siraj), the majority of Syrians support, or at least look to for protection, regardless of the barbarism in its shadows.
The long-term aim is to deny Russia a key Middle Eastern ally as part of a Nato war of attrition against the Russian Federation that eventually destroys it.”
"The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross,
who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me:
“We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked.”
"When the Panama Papers leak was published, the front page said ‘Putin’, and there was a picture of Putin; never mind that Putin was not mentioned anywhere in the leaks.”
"Smear by media inevitably becomes war by media."
"In fact, Britain, Europe and the United States wanted what they like to call “regime change” in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa. Gaddafi’s influence in the continent and, above all,
his independence was intolerable.
‘Intervention’ – what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was ‘death and destruction’.
According to its own records,
NATO launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets.
They included missiles with uranium warheads.”
“The drum-beaters of the Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
“Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education – Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia – and with careers on the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post.
These organisations are known as the liberal media.
They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT.
And they love war.'
While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life."
"Dissenting journalism and scholarship have since been systematically banished or appropriated."
“George Bush’s press spokesman once called
the media
“complicit enablers.”
Coming from a senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the media, caused such suffering, -that description is a warning from history.”
“It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda.
What is new Is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream.
A silent war continues, led by the West, ignored by the media.” writes John Pilger.
The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda.
The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psychoanalysis, it was Bernays who coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions.”
“In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade – behaviour then considered outlandish.
One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”
“Bernays’ influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War.
The secret, he said, was “engineering the consent” of people in order to “control and regiment [them]according to our will without their knowing about it”.
He described this as “the true ruling power in our society” and called it an “invisible government”.
Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood.”
Pilger writes:
“Imagine two cities.
Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people.
But there is a vital difference.
In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front-page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties.
In the second city – in another country nearby – almost exactly the same thing is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics.
The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by “us” – by the United States and Britain. They even have a media centre that is funded by Britain and America.
Another difference is that
the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys,
condemned for assaulting and bombing the city – which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city.
Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain, and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia. One is ‘good’; the other is ‘bad.’
What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria.
Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al-Qaida and al-Nusra and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today.”
If, according to Joseph Goebbels, by telling a lie enough times it becomes the truth, then the reverse is also true: by evading the truth enough times it becomes a lie.
Shaping the narrative.
(defenestration=the action of throwing someone out of a window, the action or process of dismissing someone from a position of power or authority: that victory resulted in Churchill's own defenestration by the war-weary British electorate.)
“a defenestration of all who refuse to follow a line and to swallow the unpalatable and are brave”.
“This refers to independent journalists and whistleblowers, the honest mavericks.”
“In the US, home of the great civil rights and anti-war movements, it is Black Lives Matter and the likes of Codepink that lay the roots of a modern version.”
"…For only a movement that swells into every street and across borders and does not give up can stop the warmongers."
Pilger wasn’t like 'Client Journalists- who went to the same schools as the corrupt politicians.
Whose careers are as ‘courtiers’.
Who don't all seek the truth, they only provide a narrative dictated by PR people.”
“The media keeps you up to date with all the news you already know and they can no longer hide.
They downplay or ignore the crucial US role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Iraq has suffered.”
Pilger received Bafta's Richard Dimbleby Award for factual reporting in 1991, a platform for dissenting voices.
His condemnation of Australian recognition of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, in print and in his 1994 film Death of a Nation, was correct. Pilger said:
“The recurring theme in much of my work is the imposition of great power on people, and their resistance to it."
https://blog.rorymcleod.com/john-pilger
John pilger.