In memoriam John Pilger

He consistently stood with the oppressed

John Pilger died on December 30, 2023; his timeless work lives on. Here is a small sample of his legacy. In the 1970s, John Pilger could be heard and read in the British mainstream media. Since that time, as Alexander Mercouris relates in this tribute to Pilger, he was increasingly de-platformed. As the climate crisis spins out of control and increasingly amplifies global instabilities, expect more of that.

Nicaragua and the Contras

John Pilger’s web site has a summary of his November 1983 Nicaragua documentary:

John Pilger turned his attention to Central America when President Reagan was propping up the right-wing El Salvador junta, whose death squads and National Guard were murdering thousands of their own people, and secretly destabilizing the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, which had unseated the American-backed dictator Somoza in 1979, by financing the Contra rebels without the approval of Congress. It was the latest installment in the United States’s long history of intervening in its own “backyard,” to control its resources.

This is the introductory paragraph of the documentary:

Imagine for a moment that you and your family live in one of the poorest regions of the world, Central America, often called the backyard of the United States. It's likely your home is in the countryside, a one-room shack in which there's no lavatory, no electricity, no clean drinking water. Imagine that at least two or three times in your life, you watch helplessly as a brother, or sister, or a small son or daughter falls ill with something as simple and preventable as diarrhea or measles, and dies.

It’s exactly as Archbishop Hélder Câmara said: “When I fed the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked ‘Why are they poor?’ they called me a communist.” The US labeled them all as subversive communists, as Father Xavier Gorostiaga mentions in the documentary.

Palestine is Still the Issue

John Pilger made this documentary in 1977, ten years after the 1967 Six-Day war, when it became clear to all who dared open their eyes that the state of Israel was in violation of UN Security Council resolution 242 of November 22, 1967.

First voice:

There is only one way of remedying this. Ending the occupation, because occupation has become the cancer that is eating the lives of both peoples.

Second voice:

What the occupation did for us is it reduced us to animals in a way that sometimes I'm ashamed to say that I'm an Israeli.

Third voice:

This is, you know, a huge bluff of the Israeli establishment that every criticism of its policy is anti-Semitism.

John Pilger:

This film is about the Palestinians and a group of courageous Israelis united in the oldest human struggle: to be free.

Violence and humiliation reminding Joh Pilger of apartheid South Africa:

In 1987, the Palestinians rose up in what they call Intifada. History will surely call it a war of National Liberation. They fought mainly with slingshots against tanks and planes, yet they were put down with this kind of brutality: Israeli soldiers deliberately breaking the bones of prisoners. Some of the soldiers later insisted they were carrying out official Israeli policy.

The devastating impact of checkpoints on a woman on the verge of giving birth to her second child is a story that rarely makes it to the headlines and the six o’clock news.

Not all Israelis go along; some refuse:

Some Israelis have spoken out. More than 500 soldiers have refused to serve in the occupied territories. “We are,” they’ve said, “like the Chinese student who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square. We are the conscience of our country.” Ishay Rosen-Zwi is one of them: “I really think the real story of the occupation is there in the checkpoint. I cannot forget this kind of picture, you know. Five in the morning, quarter to five in the morning, a line of hundreds of people waiting, you know, to pass the checkpoint. And you're standing there and you see in their eyes the humiliation, the frustration, the hatred. Then you are the occupation. You have all the power; they have no power.”

What transforms an ambulance volunteer, someone dedicated to caring for people, into a suicide bomber? Professor Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian, provides an answer:

The suicide bombings are presented to the Israeli public as an insane act by an insane people with whom there is no chance for peace. Instead of putting a wider analysis, which would say there is a way out of the suicide bombs. While everybody condemns them—and rightly so—there is a way out of it. And the way out of it is to provide the circumstances in which these young people would find avenues of hope instead of avenues of despair. There is, I would say, an orchestrated campaign to silence that kind of analysis inside Israel.

In 1948, three quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees:

Israel's military hero General Moshe Dayan later admitted Jewish places were built in the place of Arab villages. There isn’t a single place in the country that didn’t have a former Arab population. While Palestinians were denied the right to return to their homes, anybody who could prove they were Jewish had the right to settle in Israel. In 1967 Palestinians once again fled their homes during the Six-Day War, when Israel occupied the remaining 22 percent of Palestine, describing this as an act of self-defense.

The War You Don’t See

This 2010 documentary on war propaganda is a recurring theme in John Pilger’s body of work. Propaganda is used by governments to distort the facts, often with the complicity of the leading media outlets. On the same topic, Pilger gave a talk at the Trondheim World Festival in Norway in September 2022. Here is the introduction of his address:

In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler's leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Führer.

She told me that the ‘patriotic messages’ of her films were dependent not on ‘orders from above’ but on what she called the ‘submissive void’ of the German public.

Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. “Yes, especially them,” she said.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

Here is the part of the documentary itself:

This film is about the war you don't see. Drawing on my own experience as a war correspondent, the film will look mainly at television, concentrating on the most popular channels in America and Britain. The film will ask: What is the role of the media in rapacious wars like Iraq and Afghanistan? Why do many journalists beat the drums of war regardless of the lies of governments? And how are the crimes of war reported and justified when there are crimes?

A pioneer of modern propaganda was Edward Bernays. Bernays [a nephew of Freud] invented the term “public relations.” He wrote: “The intelligent manipulation of the masses is an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country.”

Everybody with even minimal intelligence knows this, and yet the country—and with it Western “civilization”—falls for the same fraud, again, and again, and again. All it takes is to change the words and a parade of new lying, un-accountable revolving-door generals and political leaders:

Despite being evident to anyone with even basic intelligence, the country—and by extension, Western 'civilization'—time and again succumbs to the same deception. All it takes is euphemism uttered a procession of deceitful talking heads and unaccountable revolving-door generals and political leaders:

I love this expression for the Iraq War: “the embedded journalists.” Well too many journalists have been “in bed” with the administration on a variety of issues. I would say 80 to 90 percent of what you read in a newspaper is officially inspired. If they're covering the Intelligence Community, for example, and they become critical of the CIA or a major intelligence organization, they're going to lose their sources. If they become critical of the Pentagon, it's going to be very difficult to get into the Pentagon to deal with official military sources. So I think journalists like to be part of the game, part of the inside crowd, and therefore the conventional wisdom is the best wisdom.

Dahr Jamail, journalist and author of ‘Beyond the Green Zone’ on how he saw the Iraq war:

The war we don't see in Iraq is largely the massive toll on civilians in Iraq, where daily, even now, people are being killed and wounded because of this occupation. Seeing what I see, contrasting that with what has been reported by most of the mainstream, it's like two completely different worlds.

In Fallujah, US Marines, assisted by the British, destroyed 70% of the houses and damaged much of the rest. They used white phosphorus and depleted uranium.¹ Little or nothing of these atrocities made it to TV. At the time, the New York Times was just as bad at reporting what the atomic bombing had done to Hiroshima and its inhabitants. Its reporting is no better today. But the Times is very good at spreading military propaganda. The government and the main stream media have always been able to distinguish between worthy and unworthy victims, as Ed Herman called them. Chomsky, the other author of Manufacturing Consent, similarly contrasts people with ‘unpeople.’

In reply to the question why people accept their government’s lies as truths and why the deaths of ‘unpeople’ are never mentioned, the author of Web and Deceit, the historian Mark Curtis, answers:

If you look at every war or every coup or every regime that Britain is supporting or been involved in, it's usually accompanied by an increasingly sophisticated public relations operation by the government. We're told that British foreign policy is based on promoting democracy, on spreading development and promoting human rights.

Not just Britain, but to all colonial powers have perpetrated the same fraud. But it doesn’t necessarily take colonialism, also the poor in our midst are treated as unpeople. They don’t count because they don’t contribute to the power elite’s bottom line. Sadly, it’s that simple.

Furthermore, 89 days have passed since the latest flare-up of the conflict in Palestine-Israel. During that time, 71,200 people in the US have died due to poverty, averaging 800 victims a day. The silence surrounding this issue is a disgrace for the nation, as are its warped priorities.

1. Depleted uranium (DU) is a heavy metal possessing chemotoxic and radiotoxic properties.