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John Pilger

Australian journalist

John Richard Pilger (born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist and documentary maker based in London and Sydney.

John Pilger in 2011
Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth.

Quotes edit

1990s edit

2000s edit

  • On the September 11 attacks: In these surreal days, there is one truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America last week and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else.
  • More terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth.
  • During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places.
  • There is no War on Terrorism; it is the Great Game speeded up. The difference is the rampant nature of the superpower, ensuring infinite dangers for us all.
  • Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth..."Impartiality" and "objectivity" now mean the establishment point of view...This is internalized. Journalists don't sit down and think, "I'm now going to speak for the establishment." Of course not. But they internalize a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity.
  • If those who support aggressive war had seen a fraction of what I've seen, if they'd watched children fry to death from Napalm and bleed to death from a cluster bomb, they might not utter the claptrap they do.
  • The impact of the human tragedies I've reported on is that, more often than not, I'll be angry. I want to know why is this child dying? These are not acts of God; they're results of respectable politicians' decisions.
  • When governments and other vested interests attack me personally I usually regard it as a vindication, otherwise they would use facts. That's why I believe in the wonderful Claud Cockburn dictum, 'Never believe anything until it is officially denied.' It has certainly been my experience.
  • I love irony in pictures. There's one photograph from Vietnam by Philip Jones Griffiths that shows a very large GI having his pocket picked by a tiny Vietnamese woman. It told the whole story of the clash of two cultures and how the invader could never win.
  • [On Barack Obama:] No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous 'Change you can believe in,' it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. 'We will be the most powerful,' he often declared.
  • We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down as privileges from a parliament, or a boardroom, or an institution, but that peace is only possible with justice and with information that gives us the power to act justly.
    • John Pilger, Sydney Peace Prize acceptance speech, University of Sydney (4 November 2009).
  • The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies — socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor — and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.

2010s edit

  • We journalists... have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else's country... That means always challenging the official story, however patriotic that story may appear, however seductive and insidious it is. For propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home... In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth or their blood is on us... Those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power.
    • The War You Don't See ITV (UK) (14 December 2010).
  • In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism.
    Trump's views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.
    According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is "unleashing the dark forces of violence" in the United States. Unleashing them?
  • Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn't want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted "exceptionalism" is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.
    As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies - just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about "hope". And the drool goes on.
  • WikiLeaks has achieved far more than what The New York Times and The Washington Post in their celebrated incarnations did. No newspaper has come close to matching the secrets and lies of power that Assange and Snowden have disclosed. That both men are fugitives is indicative of the retreat of liberal democracies from principles of freedom and justice. Why is WikiLeaks a landmark in journalism? Because its revelations have told us, with 100 per cent accuracy, how and why much of the world is divided and run.
  • Obama was one of the most violent U.S. Presidents. He launched or sustained seven wars and left office with none resolved: a record. In his last year as President, 2016, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, he dropped 26,171 bombs. It’s an interesting statistic; it’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day, on mostly civilians.
  • Journalists can help people by telling the truth, or by as much truth as they can find, and acting not as agents of governments, of power, but of people. That is real journalism. The rest is specious and false.
  • When I began as a journalist, especially as a foreign correspondent, the press in the UK was conservative and owned by powerful establishment forces, as it is now. But the difference compared to today is that there were spaces for independent journalism that dissented from the received 'wisdom' of authority. That space has now all but closed and independent journalists have gone to the internet, or to a metaphoric underground.
  • The single biggest challenge is rescuing journalism from its deferential role as the stenographer of great power. The United States has constitutionally the freest press on earth, yet in practice it has a media obsequious to the formulas and deceptions of power. That is why the US was effectively given media approval to invade Iraq, and Libya, and Syria and dozens of other countries.
  • WikiLeaks is possibly the most exciting development in journalism in my lifetime... The truth about the Vietnam War was told when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers. The truth about Iraq and Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia and many other flashpoints was told when WikiLeaks published the revelations of whistle-blowers.
  • When you consider that 100 percent of WikiLeaks leaks are authentic and accurate, you can understand the impact, as well as the fury generated among secretive powerful forces. Julian Assange is a political refugee in London for one reason only: WikiLeaks told the truth about the greatest crimes of the 21st century. He is not forgiven for that, and he should be supported by journalists and by people everywhere.
  • Since Chavez’s death in 2013, his successor Nicolas Maduro has shed his derisory label in the Western press as a 'former bus driver' and become Saddam Hussein incarnate.... As the journalist and film-maker Pablo Navarrete reported this week, Venezuela is not the catastrophe it has been painted. 'There is food everywhere,' he wrote. 'I have filmed lots of videos of food in markets [all over Caracas] … it’s Friday night and the restaurants are full.'
  • In the pages of liberal newspapers in the West, race and class are two words almost never uttered in the mendacious “coverage” of Washington’s latest, most naked attempt to grab the world’s greatest source of oil and reclaim its “backyard”. For all the chavistas’ faults — such as allowing the Venezuelan economy to become hostage to the fortunes of oil and never seriously challenging big capital and corruption — they brought social justice and pride to millions of people and they did it with unprecedented democracy.
  • Should the CIA stooge Guaido and his white supremacists grab power, it will be the 68th overthrow of a sovereign government by the United States, most of them democracies. A fire sale of Venezuela’s utilities and mineral wealth will surely follow, along with the theft of the country’s oil, as outlined by John Bolton. Under the last Washington-controlled government in Caracas, poverty reached historic proportions. There was no healthcare for those could not pay. There was no universal education; Mavis Mendez, and millions like her, could not read or write.
  • Julian [Assange] is a distinguished Australian, who has changed the way many people think about duplicitous governments. For this, he is a political refugee subjected to what the United Nations calls 'arbitrary detention'. The UN says he has the right of free passage to freedom, but this is denied. He has the right to medical treatment without fear of arrest, but this is denied. He has the right to compensation, but this is denied. As founder and editor of WikiLeaks, his crime has been to make sense of dark times. WikiLeaks has an impeccable record of accuracy and authenticity which no newspaper, no TV channel, no radio station, no BBC, no New York Times, no Washington Post, no Guardian can equal.
  • The persecution of Julian Assange is the conquest of us all: of our independence, our self respect, our intellect, our compassion, our politics, our culture. So stop scrolling. Organise. Occupy. Insist. Persist. Make a noise. Take direct action. Be brave and stay brave. Defy the thought police. War is not peace, freedom is not slavery, ignorance is not strength. If Julian can stand up, so can you: so can all of us.

2020s edit

  • On 28 January China said it would welcome international help as it struggled to contain coronavirus. No substantial help has come. Instead of solidarity and defying WHO, the US, Australia, Britain seek to isolate China, returning it to a state of siege and the dangers of the past.
  • A pandemic has been declared, but not for the 24,600 who die every day from unnecessary starvation, and not for 3,000 children who die every day from preventable malaria, and not for the 10,000 people who die every day because they are denied publicly-funded healthcare, and not for the hundreds of Venezuelans and Iranians who die every day because America's blockade denies them life-saving medicines, and not for the hundreds of mostly children bombed or starved to death every day in Yemen, in a war supplied and kept going, profitably, by America and Britain. Before you panic, consider them.
  • It’s difficult to separate the Uygurs from the barrage of anti-China denunciations coming from the US, most of which have a script familiar to those who follow America’s 'soft' campaigns against its strategic enemies... The leading US media are invariably the cipher. 'In China, every day is Kristallnacht', declared The Washington Post [last November], likening China’s treatment of the Uygurs to that of the Nazi genocide of the Jews.... That’s not untypical; it reads as if it has been written by the US Agency for International Development or the National Endowment for Democracy, which fills in for the CIA. No one doubts the ruthless reaction of Beijing to separatists, but as a reporter, I would like to see for myself.
  • I suggest in The Dirty War on the NHS we look beyond this virus and ask how our current state of fear and its mass obedience will be exploit­ed in future. Will the workers 'stood down' ever see their jobs again? Will artificial intelligence consume freedoms that have been suspended? As Edward Snowden says, the disease of mass surveillance will outlast this pandemic. Will Julian Assange [the Australian founder of WikiLeaks], persecuted for the crime of truthful journalism, survive?
  • The coming war on China is likely to happen by mistake or accident as a result of deliberate provocations by the US and its echoes. Under cover of the pandemic, the Trump regime is sending strategic bombers and spy drones within sight of China itself. Our silence is our peril.
  • Julian #Assange is in solitary, denied visitors. He ordered a radio from the prison catalogue six months ago. A friend also ordered him a radio and the authorities returned it, unopened. Even the Beirut hostages Waite, Keenan and McCarthy listened to a radio. This is torture.
  • I grew up in the cold war. Third-rate academics and a rag bag of charlatans made fools of themselves with their mighty conspiracy theory of Chinese (aka the Yellow Peril) under our beds. They're back!
  • The fake "independent institute" promoting the China "threat" in the West is the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the go-to source for Vichy journalists currently hoodwinking the public. It's exposed here as a front for warmongers and arms companies.
  • To quote, without verifiable evidence, "western intelligence sources" is never journalism; it is almost always propaganda. I learned that as a reporter. The cold war drum beat of the BBC and others is leading us to a world war.

About John Pilger edit

  • Over the course of nearly three-and-a-half months, the novel coronavirus outbreak has infected over 127,000 and left over 4,700 dead. While this has sparked global panic and a WHO-declaration of a pandemic, then death toll is still a far cry from that of starvation, Malaria and war. This was the point made by BAFTA-award winning journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger who took to Facebook on Thursday, to highlight how, despite the fact that 24,600 people died each day from starvation and 3,000 children from preventable Malaria, no pandemic has been declared for them.
  • His trademark has always been to sidestep the accepted version of the facts, a modus operandi that served him well during the Vietnam war, in the apocalyptic post-Pol Pot Cambodia, the killing fields of East Timor and countless other hotspots... becoming an octogenari­an hasn’t mellowed him in the least.
  • (The Coming War on China) was made before news broke of the upheavals in Xinjiang, along with reports that the Uygur minority was being persecuted. Typically, Pilger’s reaction was to avoid instantly pointing a finger at Beijing, and to look for an alternative narrative... The major broadcasters in China competed to acquire rights to show the film (The Coming War on China) ... All I had to do, they said, was remove the Tiananmen Square sequence. Interestingly, the references to dissidents and other critical sections could stay. I said ‘no’ to any changes, and there were no deals. Within a week, [a pirated version] appeared on the internet with Chinese subtitles – including the Tiananmen Square sequence. Then a friend called from Shanghai to say he had bought a DVD of the film in his local shop – unedited and openly on sale.”

See also edit

External links edit

 
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