The highly principled and courageous investigative journalist and film maker John Pilger, who died on 30 December at the age of 84, spent his life fighting for justice. Through more than 60 documentaries, a dozen books and hundreds of articles in newspapers he chronicled and exposed both the crimes of imperialism and the complicity of a mainstream press that covered them up.
Pilger wrote extensively about the support given by his native Australia to the atrocities committed by Indonesia in East Timor, and consistently covered his country’s appalling treatment of the indigenous Aboriginal population: the shocking levels of deprivation, squalor and disease imposed on these communities, and their subjection to unending racism at the hands of the state and police were exposed in his searing 1989 book, A Secret Country. Pilger had moved to Britain in 1962 and, after joining the Daily Mirror, became one of the first journalists to enter Cambodia after its liberation from the Khmer Rouge by the forces of communist Vietnam in 1979. In a series of articles for the Mirror he not only described the horrors he saw – but how the relentless bombing of Cambodia by the United States had facilitated the rise of Pol Pot. His film Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia has never been shown in the United States. Pilger documented a wide range of injustices, including the shameful role of the British Labour government in the 2003 war in Iraq. He spoke out against ‘the rise and rise of rapacious imperial power and a terrorism that never speaks its name, because it is our terrorism’. While not a communist – and he prided himself on his fierce independence from any political organisation – he nonetheless understood the brutal logic of the capitalist system and its drive towards war.
He wrote: ‘In our system of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared… today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called “forever wars”: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.’
Much of his firepower was reserved for the role of the mainstream press, whom he correctly identified as key players in enabling the ruling class to carry out its crimes, by covering up the truth or spewing out lies and propaganda. One example was the BBC, ‘with its specious neutrality, mythically balancing contending extremes while turning out a flow of official deceptions as “news”’.
The blanket propaganda used to justify NATO’s imperialist war in Ukraine he described as ‘a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission’, pointing out that journalists who did not toe a line acceptable to the establishment would find themselves ‘defenestrated’. Pilger himself fell foul of The Guardian’s editorial line, with his staunch support for the struggle in Palestine. His last column for them appeared in 2015, after which, as he put it, they ‘got rid of people like me and others in pretty much a purge of those who were saying what
The Guardian no longer says any more’. His public condemnation of the Zionist occupation of Palestine also turned him into persona non grata at the BBC, unofficially dubbed an ‘anti-semite’ after he made the 2002 documentary, Palestine is still the issue. Although it has some political weaknesses, including support for the Oslo agreements and a two-state solution, the film remains a powerful indictment of the crimes of the Zionist state.
Pilger understood that it was the complicity of the United States and Britain with Israel – ‘the colonial anachronism and unleashed attack dog’ – arming it to the teeth and granting it impunity for its crimes, that ensured, as he put it, that the blood and tears never dried in Palestine. Following 7 October 2023, he pointed out that ‘British MPs who dare call for a ceasefire in Gaza are banished, the iron door of two-party politics closed to them by a Labour leader who would withhold water and food from children.’ A long-time subscriber to Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!, Pilger was one of the first people to preview and recommend our book Labour: a party fit for imperialism.
Despite being sidelined and vilified by the mainstream media, Pilger never stopped fighting against injustice. He believed in the duty of journalists to speak the truth and in the power of the people to resist. In recent years, he was a staunch supporter of the Australian founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, in his battle against extradition to the US, and of the whistleblower David MacBride who was prosecuted for exposing war crimes committed in Afghanistan by Australian troops. Little over a month before his death, Pilger wrote in Consortium News: ‘Julian and David are Spartacus. The Palestinians are Spartacus. People who fill the streets with flags and principle and solidarity are Spartacus. We are all Spartacus if we want to be.’
To discover the full range of John Pilger’s work, go to: www.johnpilger.com
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 298 February/March 2024
