Talk:John Pilger

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Quotes about Pilger

Removing some that are neither quotable nor pithy. WQ is not Wikipedia; it is not our job to catalog claims about people's mistakes and missteps unless those have been expressed in some quotable and interesting way. HouseOfChange (talk) 00:45, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

• But, Pilger objected, "Amnesty produced a catalogue of Saddam's killings that amounted mostly to hundreds every year, not millions. It is an appaling record that does not require the exaggeration of state-inspired propaganda".
  In fact Pilger's own source said (unquoted by him) that, in addition to the number of known executions Amnesty had also collected information on around 17,000 cases of disappearances, over the last 20 years, and "the real figure may be much higher".
• During the Anfal anti-Kurdish campaign in 1987 as many as 180,000 Kurds disappeared. At Halabja, in one incident alone, more people were killed than in the whole of this latest Gulf war. The most conservative death toll attached to the repression of the Shia uprising in 1991 was 30,000. One million died in the Iran-Iraq war started by Saddam.
  And this is reduced by Pilger to "hundreds every year".
  • David Aaronovitch "Lies and the Left", The Observer (27 April 2003), p. 29
  • Not clearly identified as an Observer article in the online source, this article can also be found here.

• The Australian reporter John Pilger echoes the views of [Eva] Bartlett and [Vanessa] Beeley in interviews. Pilger ... has a new platform on RT, which he uses to deny chemical weapons attacks such as the one at Khan Shaykhun. He, too, frequently attacks the White Helmets as Islamic extremists, and has cited Beeley’s writing as if it were authoritative journalism.
  • Janine di Giovanni "Why Assad and Russia Target the White Helmets", The New York Review of Books (16 October 2018)

• [E]ight days after the Khan Shaykhun attack John Pilger, famous for exposing propaganda and lies, was interviewed on the website Consortium News. He praised [Theodore] Postol as "the distinguished MIT professor", suggested that the Syrian government could not have carried out the attack – as he claimed it had destroyed its chemical arsenal in 2014 – and maintained that jihadists in Khan Shaykhun "have been playing with nerve gases and sarin … for some years now. There’s no doubt about that." Despite many claims to the contrary, I have found no credible evidence that Syrian jihadists have access to sarin.
  • George Monbiot "A lesson from Syria: it's crucial not to fuel far-right conspiracy theories", The Guardian (15 November 2017)
  • See Use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war.

• 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.
  • Here is what legendary journalist John Pilger said about coronavirus outbreak Pilger decries inattention to hunger, malaria and American wars and blockades, The Week, (12 March 2020)

• (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.”
  • John Pilger on 50 years spent shining a light into humanity’s darkest corners, Ed Peters, South China Morning Post, (9 May 2020)

• Pilger's early Cambodia films, Year Zero (1979) and Year One (1980), were very moving, made Cambodia and the horror of the Khmer Rouge rule a real issue for millions of people and raised a lot of money for Cambodia. But I thought both films were flawed by the equation of America and the Khmer Rouge. By skilful orchestration of emotions and actuality, Pilger seemed to show that, of governments, only the Vietnamese really cared about helping Cambodia and that official Western aid was designed to subvert rather than succour. I thought that this was dangerous nonsense, dangerous for hungry Cambodians, because the Vietnamese had put outrageous restrictions on aid. Also, to accept Vietnamese domination of the country seemed to me like accepting Soviet domination of Poland because they liberated it from the Nazis.
  • William Shawcross "The trouble with John Pilger", The Observer (17 March 1991), p. 20
  • In an Observer article a week later, Pilger (with David Mumro) said he had compared "Pol Pot's reign" to "Stalin's terror". Shawcross was critical of Pilger's work in The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience published in 1984.

HouseOfChange (talk) 00:45, 26 June 2024 (UTC)