John Pilger Videos

[panopticon]

G'day All,

I thought I'd do a thread with all the available John Pilger documentaries I could find online.
Pilger is someone I admire and regard as, I've said a number of times, a "personal truth speaker".

He is an ex-pat Australian journalist and documentary maker living in London.
His knowledge is vast and I find much of his work compelling.

Pilger's website is: http://www.johnpilger.com
He has a collection of articles at The New Statesman: http://www.newstatesman.com/writers/john_pilger
For more information on him try this wikipedia page.

1970
Vietnam: The Quiet Mutiny

1971
Conversations With a Working Man

1974
Vietnam: Still America's War
Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Thalidomide: The Ninety-Eight We Forgot

1975
An Unfashionable Tragedy

2003
Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror

2004
Stealing a Nation

2007
The War on Democracy

2010
The War You Don't See

Anyway here's the first documentary he made back in 1970 (he is so young in this) which I did post elsewhere but thought I'd repost here as this thread is pure Pilger.

'Vietnam: The Quiet Mutiny'

John Pilger's first documentary from 1970 about the Vietnam War "from the grunts perspective".
Run Time: 26 minutes.
Screened: 1971.

From Wikipedia:

"The Quiet Mutiny" in 1970 was the first of over 60 documentary films by Pilger. Filmed at Camp Snuffy, the film presented a character study of the common US soldier during the Vietnam War, revealing the shifting morale and open rebellion of Western troops. Pilger described the film as "something of a scoop" - it was the first documentary to show the open rebellion within the drafted ranks of the US military that led to the withdrawal of the land army in 1973. "When I flew to New York and showed it to Mike Wallace, the star reporter of CBS' 60 Minutes, he agreed. "Real shame we can't show it here"", Pilger said in an interview with the New Statesman.

The interview mentioned from The New Statesman is from September 11, 2006 and titled 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised'.


Source: Watch on Vimeo


http://vimeo.com/17634407

Kind Regards,
Panopticon

[panopticon]

'An Unfashionable Tragedy'

Run Time: 27 minutes.
Screened 1975.

This documentary depicts the plight of the Bangladeshi during the horrors of the 1974 famine where it is estimated that over a million people starved to death (official records stated 26,000).
It looks at the politics involved (the US withheld aid to gain political advantage) and the tragedy this produced.

Pilger also comments on the problems media depiction of horrific events have.
People change the channel and watch something that isn't upsetting...


Source: Watch on Vimeo


http://vimeo.com/16962418
Kind Regards,
Panopticon

Alternatives:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...24126983563833
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iiWlsOnzhtM

[Krullenjongen]

Do you really want to do this in chronological order or can i also post a few of my favorite Pilger video's?

[panopticon]

Posted by Krullenjongen (here)
Do you really want to do this in chronological order or can i also post a few of my favorite Pilger video's?

G'day Krullenjongen,

By all means post away.
I thought I'd add links in the first post to the other posts.
Pilger has so many exceptional documentaries and I just wanted to share them as I've found that so many people haven't heard of him.... Yet!
Good to have you on board!
Kind Regards,
Panopticon

[panopticon]

Conversations With a Working Man

Run Time: 27 minutes
Screened: 1971

'This is a film about working people and one working man - Jack Walker. Jack represents the silent core of this country - those millions of average Britons who feel they have no voice and have little power to control their way of life.'

This documentary was to show that normal ordinary working class folk are able to talk for themselves.
'Indeed it was so unusual to see an ordinary trade unionist speaking virtually on his own terms, that the film... began to receive special attention during its editing.'
In classic establishment style there were suggestions that some of the content should be changed.
'Working class' should become 'working heritage'.
The use of the term 'the people' had Marxist overtones and should be modified.

Pilger said that at the time 'I had not read much Marx, so I didn't know. But surely "the people" had existed before Marx?'

Anyway, please enjoy a working class trade unionist talking for himself 'without intrusion by those who often claim to speak for him'.


Source: Watch on Vimeo


http://vimeo.com/16962265
Kind Regards,
Panopticon

[Krullenjongen]

Oke cool.
The first one i like very much is:

BREAKING THE SILENCE

John Pilger dissects the truth and lies in the 'war on terror'. Award-winning journalist John Pilger investigates the discrepancies between American and British claims for the 'war on terror' and the facts on the ground as he finds them in Afghanistan and Washington, DC. In 2001, as the bombs began to drop, George W. Bush promised Afghanistan "the generosity of America and its allies". Now, the familiar old warlords are regaining power, religious fundamentalism is renewing its grip and military skirmishes continue routinely. In "liberated" Afghanistan, America has its military base and pipeline access, while the people have the warlords who are, says one woman, "in many ways worse than the Taliban". In Washington, Pilger conducts a series of remarkable interviews with William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, and leading Administration officials such as Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. These people, and the other architects of the Project for the New American Century, were dismissed as 'the crazies' by the first Bush Administration in the early 90s when they first presented their ideas for pre-emptive strikes and world domination. Pilger also interviews presidential candidate General Wesley Clark, and former intelligence officers, all the while raising searching questions about the real motives for the 'war on terror'. While President Bush refers to the US attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq as two 'great victories', Pilger asks the question - victories over whom, and for what purpose? Pilger describes Afghanistan as a country "more devastated than anything I have seen since Pol Pot's Cambodia". He finds that Al-Qaida has not been defeated and that the Taliban is re-emerging. And of the "victory" in Iraq, he asks: "Is this Bush's Vietnam?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=a2BpNsgwrMs

[Krullenjongen]

Another one i found very informative was....

THE WAR YOU DON'T SEE

The war you don’t see is whatever our governments don’t want you to see, argues John Pilger’s ITV documentary. Military propaganda is directed, not just abroad, but at the British and American public. It works to manipulate public opinion with the complicity of a supine and short-sighted media – covering up the bloody limb-tearing, body-shattering killings of civilians by its armed forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine.
The most effective censorship is the co-option of mainstream media into the propaganda effort. In today’s news culture, this is easier than ever. The job of journalism is to report the elites, according to news managers like the BBC’s Fran Unsworth and ITV’s David Mannion. In the ‘echo-chamber’ of the 24-hour news cycle, the words of those in power are amplified a thousand times over.
A line-up of respected journalists offered mea culpas on their reporting failures in the run up to the Iraq War, ‘Had journalists questioned the deceptions…the invasion would not have happened’ declared Dan Rather when Pilger needled the CBS news anchor on his wartime encomium to George W. Bush . Pilger’s argument is more self-effacing, and simpler: the news media’s job is to test government claims, and it isn’t doing its job.
There are few journalists reporting the victims’ side in the battle and these accounts are ignored by the mainstream media or silenced by governments. One of the most powerful claims comes from Pilger's interview with BBC journalist Rageh Omaar. He describes the bombing of Al-Jazeera's offices in Kabul claiming they were deliberately targeted by the US. The reason for the bombing, the program suggests, was Al-Jazeera's willingness to show the brutality of the American and British invasions. Wiki-leak’s founder, Julien Assange’s impish enjoyment of the freedom of the internet now draws a wry smile. At the time of the broadcast he was still languishing in ‘Orwellian conditions’, according to his lawyer, in a British jail.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nvnkrUQarrE

[Corncrake]

Thanks for starting this thread Panoptikan - Pilger is one of my heroes. He is a great humanitarian and documentary maker Although there are some glaring issues he doesn't tackle, as far as he goes he is brilliant and a great way in for people who find people like Alex Jones and David Icke too far out there.

[panopticon]

Vietnam: Still America's War

Run Time: 27 minutes
Screened: 1974

Documentary filmed 16 months after the 1973 'Paris Peace Accord' was signed.

'After the 1973 Paris Agreement and military ceasefire, more than 70,000 soldiers and civilians have been killed. The local populace still have to contend with mines and other legacies of the war.'

Investigating the aftermath in Vietnam following the ceasefire.

During the 'Vietnam War' around 58,000 Americans and an estimated 2 million Vietnamese were killed.

At filming there were still around 7000 American personel in Vietnam working as contractors.

Main points:

• Use of American civilian contractors to replace military.
• Continued inflow of arms from the US to South Vietnam.
• Death of fish and pollution of waterways from defoliant agents.
• Continued placement of mines by military.
• Civilian injuries from mines and grenades.
• Children and other civilians forced to work as 'mine detectors' by military.

As one contractor said about the Vietnam war:

52,000 American deaths are less than we lose in traffic in one year, you don't even miss it. It wasn't a great war, but it was the only war we had.

70,000 dead in 16 months in what Nixon referred to as a "Peace with honour" (the period following the cease fire and withdrawal of US troops).

As one interviewee said about the horror of the aftermath of it all:

it's almost as if you've got to continue believing the myth that it is good that we were here.

The documentary would have been filmed around 2 years before the fall of Saigon.


Source: Watch on Vimeo


http://vimeo.com/16961984

Kind Regards,
Panopticon

Alternative Site:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...35298098727429

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties
http://www.militaryfactory.com/vietnam/casualties.asp

[W.C.]

The War on Democracy, my personal favourite:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FXTnVsy32bE

Award winning journalist John Pilger examines the role of Washington in America's manipulation of Latin American politics during the last 50 years leading up to the struggle by ordinary people to free themselves from poverty and racism.

The film reveals similar CIA policies to be continuing in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon. The rise of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez despite ongoing Washington backed efforts to unseat him in spite of his overwhelming mass popularity, is democratic in a way that we have forgotten or abandoned in the west.

A wise cinematographic decision by Pilger is to interview and show the people of these nations. Pilger features extensive footage with Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez. This is a man demonised by President Bush, but one about whom the facts are harder to determine. That he has used much of his country's vast oil wealth to benefit the poor is largely accepted, give or take some details. But that he has taken steps to concentrate power in himself arouses sterner debate. War on Democracy, uniquely, shows us the country from the inside... the footage of the countries, and often just the day-to-day lives are lovely and the mountainous backdrops of Bolivia, Peru, and Chile, are beautiful.

This documentary is a powerful indictment of greed and of the possible benefits available to ALL if the US will allow sovereign governments to work autonomously.

[panopticon]

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Run Time: 29 minutes
Screened: 1974

This is an interesting documentary from Pilger.
It pointed out the conditions that individuals who were "on remand" in Britain, in the early 70's, were subjected to. It questioned why, when the legal system professed to believe that a "defendant" was 'guilty until proven innocent', they were subjected to conditions not fit for a dog.

Major points:

• Sanitary facilities (or lack thereof -- use of a pot).
• Lack of time outside cell (three half hour meals and one half hour exercise yard -- that is two hours in twenty four).
• Medicalisation of inmates.
• Lack of recourse to authorities.
• Age of inmates.
• Increased use of remand by judges and magistrates.
• Number of innocent people held on remand with no recourse.

Following the documentary is a reply in regards to the points made in it.


Source: Watch on Vimeo


http://vimeo.com/16960964

Kind Regards,
Panopticon

[jorr lundstrom]

How Diego Garcia was stolen

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WucOPZLQYoA

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=51LmhA4SIrI

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=T_-Z3rHX7qw

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=pWjG50wm16A

[Corncrake]

That was horrifying - I had not seen it before. Thanks for posting Jorr. A blatant example of how money or power speaks. Why am I surprised! In part because it is like slavery using and disposing of people without their consent and also because it took place during the Wilson government - a labour government that was meant to stand up for the people. And reparations have still not been made after all those years. I am going to send this to so many people ...

[panopticon]

Thalidomide: The Ninety-Eight We Forgot

Run Time: 26 minutes
Screened: 1974

Thalidomide was a sedative given to alleviate morning sickness, sleeping disorders and headaches.
It caused birth defects in unborn children.
This film was about the 98 English children whose family had not been compensated by the manufacturers of Thalidomide.

During the English compensation case there were two lists created, an X list and a Y list.
X had "acceptable proof" that they had taken the drug.
Y did not have acceptable proof (thalidomide was either given by a doctor/pharmacist without prescription or records of it were lost/discarded)

There were difficulties in making doctors and pharmacists aware of the withdrawal of thalidomide and some brands were not immediately reported as containing thalidomide.

The lack of medical records available from the period made it hard for parents to have sufficient proof.

The parents interviewed made the point, were adamant about it in fact, that the money wasn't for them, it was for the children and it would help them when when their parents were dead. It was about giving the children a chance at a life.

There are still cases being heard today in relation to Thalidomide.
Here is one, from 13 December 2011, where an Australian victim is being told by the German company that it would be oppressive for her case to be heard in Australia.

Here's Pilger's documentary from almost 40 years ago:


Source: Watch on Vimeo


http://vimeo.com/16962853
Kind Regards,
Panopticon

Alternative Sources:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...60795715383231

[Krullenjongen]

Oke here goes another one of my favorites...


WAR BY OTHER MEANS

John Pilger and David Munro examine the policy of First World banks agreeing loans with Third World countries, who are then unable to meet the crippling interest charges....John Pilger questions whether poor countries will ever develop while burdened with massive debts to the West.

Won Geneva International TV Award at the North-South Media Encounters event, Geneva, 1993;Gold Medal in the 'Best Documentary Production category' of the International Television Movie Festival, Mount Freedom, New Jersey 1993; Gold Award in the 'Political/International Issues category' at WorldFest-Houston (Houston International Film & Video Festival), 1993; Silver Hugo Award in the 'Documentary - Social/Political category' of the 29th Chicago International Film Festival, 1993

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UFg2jbQ-Fq0

[Corncrake]

Read John Pilger's on 'the World War on Democracy' here: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...t=va&aid=28753

[Ewan]

Bumping this because I just watched Breaking The Silence: Truth And Lies In The War On Terror Link

The same story unfolds endlessly down through the ages, and the people, the common people, rarely ever see anything thanks to their addiction to authority*.

*IE: The conditioning of propaganda which begins, increasingly obviously, through education, and continues throughout life, via the media.

Six months after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and two years after the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, John Pilger’s documentary Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror highlighted the hypocrisy and double standards of the American and British adventures of 2001-3, which led to the deaths of more than a million people.

The film opens with a series of haunting war photographs. Over the carnage, George W Bush says, ‘The United States will bring to the Iraqi people food and medicines and supplies, and freedom.’ His voice dissolves into the high-pitch of his co-conspirator, Tony Blair, who exalts his actions as ‘a fight for freedom’ and ‘a fight for justice’.

Pilger asks, ‘What are the real aims of this war and who are the most threatening terrorists?' In a remote village in Afghanistan, he interviews Orifa, who lost eight members of her family, including six children, when an American plane dropped a 500-pound bomb on her mud-brick home. This is juxtaposed with Bush telling Congress that the United States is ‘a friend to the Afghan people’. Few countries have been helped less by the United States – less than three per cent of all aid to Afghanistan is for reconstruction from war damage.

Kabul, the capital, is a maze of destruction, with cluster bombs not cleared from the city centre and families living in abandoned buildings. ‘I’ve spent much of my life in places of upheaval, but I’ve rarely seen such a ruined city as Kabul,’ says Pilger, standing in a shoe factory where the populations of two villages have squatted, destitute.

Most of the damage was inflicted not by the ‘official enemy’, the Taliban, but by warlords backed, trained and funded by the United States, who restored the poppy harvests and opium trade, which the Taliban had banned.

Recalling the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pilger reveals that President Jimmy Carter signed a secret presidential decree authorising the bank-rolling of the warlords, known as the mujahedin, to fight the Red Army. Among them, the CIA and Britain's MI6 trained Islamic extremists, including Osama bin Laden, as part of what was called Operation Cyclone. From this, says Pilger, ‘came the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and [the attacks of] September 11th’.

The Taliban were also the United States's secret friends. Shortly after they took power in Afghanistan, they were offered a bribe by the administration of President Bill Clinton if they backed a plan for an oil pipeline from central Asia through Afghanistan. However, when George W Bush became President, the connection between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban was an embarrassment, and the tie was cut.

Pilger's interviews with administration officials – described by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern as ‘the crazies’ – are perhaps the highlight of a film made when 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq were raw. He interviews Under Secretary of State John Bolton, who is today Donald Trump's National Security Adviser. Bolton tells Pilger that the United States has done more ‘to create conditions in which individuals can be free around the world than any other country’. When Pilger points to the US record of bombing countries into submission, Bolton says, ‘Are you a Labour Party member… or a Communist Party member?’ When Pilger replies that Tony Blair's Labour Party are his allies, he says, ‘Oh, really?’

How do the people with the least integrity, the least grasp of reality, the least sense of morals get into these positions of 'power'? It is a question worthy of pondering on for a good long time, deeply, for everyone.

I wonder what conclusions you may reach.

[Tintin]

"“US foreign policy,” he said, is “best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.”"

- Harold Pinter

"Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever."

- John Pilger

***

A fitting place to remember John Pilger and this piece published August 2023 in the Eurasia Review which is certainly compatible with Ewan's post above

***

John Pilger: Silencing The Lambs (How Propaganda Works) – OpEd



Source: Eurasia Review

August 22, 2023
By John Pilger

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.

I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.

Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch and better connected.

Are we? Or do we live in a media society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power?

The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top ten media companies is based in North America. The internet and social media — Google, Twitter, Facebook — are mostly American-owned and controlled.

In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.

The extent and scale of this carnage are largely unreported, and unrecognised; and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.

In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence.

“US foreign policy,” he said, is “best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.”

In accepting the Nobel prize for literature, Pinter said this: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage — that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the “hypnosis” he referred to was the “submissive void” described by Leni Riefenstahl.

"It’s the same,” he replied. “It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.”

In our systems 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. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.

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.

Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Nato’s destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didn’t happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan.

Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are — not that President Joe Biden’s theft of $7-billion of the country’s bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio in Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan — and 30 seconds to its starving people.

At its summit in Madrid in June, Nato, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes ‘multi-domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitors’. In other words, nuclear war.

It says: “Nato’s enlargement has been a historic success.”

I read that in disbelief.

A measure of this “historic success” is the war in Ukraine, news of which is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, and omission. I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.

In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.

In 2014, the United States sponsored a coup in Kyiv that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor who the Americans made clear was their man.

In recent years, American “defender” missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to James Baker’s “promise” to Gorbachev in February 1990 that Nato would never expand beyond Germany.

Ukraine is the frontline. Nato has effectively reached the very borderland through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23-million people dead in the Soviet Union.

Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals? On 24 February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine. This was the final straw.

On the same day, Russia invaded — according to the Western media, an unprovoked act of congenital infamy. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.

On 25 April, the US defence secretary, General Lloyd Austin, flew into Kyiv and confirmed that America’s aim was to destroy the Russian Federation — the word he used was “weaken”.

America had got the war it wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn.Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” — except one.

When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it?

According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14 000 people have been killed in the Kyiv regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.

Watch an ITV news report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraine’s Azov (neo-Nazi) battalion.

In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stephen Bandera. The New York Times called the thugs “nationalists.”

“The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,” said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battalion, “is to lead the white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

Since February, a campaign of self-appointed “news monitors” (mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) have sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraine’s neo-Nazis don’t exist.

Airbrushing, a term once associated with Stalin’s purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.In less than a decade, a “good” China has been airbrushed and a “bad” China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.

Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and “think tanks,” such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labelled those spreading Chinese influence as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows” and called for these “pests” to be “eradicated.”

News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point-blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a “noose.”

Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the “conflict” of “two narratives.” The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.

The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisers working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.

This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of World War I was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs. In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, CP Scott, confided to Prime Minister Lloyd George: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.”

The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as Covid. It is as if we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which “we” are moral and benign and “they” are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.

The history that is a living presence in China and Russia is rarely explained and rarely understood. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler. Xi Jinping is Fu Man Chu. Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is.

When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists factory-style is not the answer. Neither is the wondrous digital tool, which is a means, not an end, like the one-finger typewriter and the linotype machine.

In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.

The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking. When Assange and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for the Guardian, the New York Times and other self-important “papers of record,” he was celebrated.

When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Assange’s character, he was made a public enemy. Then vice-president Biden called him a “hi-tech terrorist”. Hillary Clinton asked, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”

The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Assange — the UN Rapporteur on Torture called it “mobbing” — brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators: as Vichy journalists.

When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, Globetrotter, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.

And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will filmmakers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?

Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.

[Tintin]

LIBRARIAN UPDATE

I'd started a library directory of John Pilger's documentary work back in 2020 to which I may add articles, although a search on 'Pilger' will yield a fair few pieces of his work largely centered around the case of Julian Assange.

There are some gaps in the record which I am addressing now and hope that before the day is out those critical documentaries of his which have been hitherto absent from our library will be uploaded.

In the meantime the link to his extraordinary work, here: https://avalonlibrary.net/?dir=John_Pilger

[Tintin]

"They are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear."

- John Pilger

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John Pilger's final essay published by Declassified Australia, today, January 1st

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THERE IS A WAR COMING, SHROUDED IN PROPAGANDA

John Pilger's final essay investigates why today there is ‘a silence filled by a consensus of propaganda’ as the world's two greatest powers draw closer to conflict.

Source: Declassified Australia



Speaking truth to power. Journalist, John Pilger, informed the world about the consequences of the unfettered power of imperialism and colonialism. Here he is filming a 'piece to camera' in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, USA, for his prescient 2016 film, "The Coming War on China". (Image: Dartmouth Films)

In his final published essay, John Pilger, who passed away on Saturday, recalls the ‘electric’ opposition of writers and journalists to the coming war in the 1930s, and investigates why today there is ‘a silence filled by a consensus of propaganda’ as the two greatest powers draw closer to conflict.

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In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on ‘the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists’ to discuss the ‘rapid crumbling of capitalism’ and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public with more than a thousand turned away.

Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and journalists to speak out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out.

The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed, and ‘all of us under the shadow of violent great power’.

Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda: ‘The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.’

"They are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear."

Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear. Let me give you one example:

On 7 March, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on ‘the looming threat’ of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity.

No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A ‘panel of experts’ presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the west’s war industry.

‘Beijing could strike within three years,’ they warned. ‘We are not ready.’ Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough. ‘Australia’s holiday from history is over’: whatever that might mean.

There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway ‘lucky’ country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained ‘experts’. What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful.

The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ‘national security reporters’ I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering.

'How did it come to this?’ Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. ‘Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?’

The voices are heard in the *samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, George Orwell are obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder.

A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans ‘foreign interference’ by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?


Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of ‘identity’. American admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for ‘advice’. Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra low-rent politicians: a Johnson or a Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Zelensky.

No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about ‘crumbling capitalism’ and the lethal provocations of ‘our’ leaders. The most infamous of these, Tony Blair, a prima facie 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.

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.

In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow’. The coup regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name.

At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias’ active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.

Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel’, was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.

This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist’, regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a Nato-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.

Journalists who travelled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.

In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligensia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic.

Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s ‘assets’ in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide – a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.

The university hired a leading Queen’s Counsel to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the ‘important issue of academic freedom of expression’ and found ‘Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech’. Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished.

Proudly receiving the Sydney Peace Prize in 2009 in the city of his birth, to which he so much loved regularly returning. (Photo: Sydney Peace Foundation)

A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that ‘for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life’.

No Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin revealed the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, ‘the last to raise his voice’, wrote Eagleton.

here did post-modernism – the rejection of actual politics and authentic dissent – come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, ‘The Greening of America’, offers a clue. America then was in a state of upheaval; Nixon was in the White House; a civil resistance, known as ‘the movement’, had burst out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that touched almost everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it presented the most serious challenge to Washington’s power for a century.

On the cover of Reich’s book were these words: ‘There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.’

At the time I was a correspondent in the United States and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialised his book, whose message was that the ‘political action and truth-telling’ of the 1960s had failed and only ‘culture and introspection’ would change the world. It felt as if hippydom was claiming the consumer classes. And in one sense it was.

Within a few years, the cult of ‘me-ism’ had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political and the media was the message. Make money, it said.

As for ‘the movement’, its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton put an end to all that. The police were now in open war with black people; Clinton’s notorious welfare bills broke world records in the number of mostly blacks they sent to jail.

When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new ‘threats’ on ‘America’s frontier’ (as the Project for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.

In the years since, America has gone to war with the world. According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s ‘war on terror’ was ‘at least’ 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

This figure does not include the dead of US-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, said the report, ‘could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOS’.

‘At least’ one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or five percent 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 Dick Cheny, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Jack Straw, John Howard et al – were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a ‘media personality’.

In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, ‘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?’

He replied. ‘If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.’

I put the same question to Dan Rather, the famous CBS anchor, who gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer , who had promoted Saddam Hussein’s ‘threat’, and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, gave me the same answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having been ‘duped’, spoke for many reporters bereft of his courage to say so.

Their point is worth repeating. Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and Islamic State might not have existed.

Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its ‘allies’ and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools?

Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945: ‘Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.’

One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Obama’s two terms that American foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported.

‘I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,’ said Obama, who expanded a favourite presidential pastime, bombing, and death squads known as ‘special operations’ as no other president had done since the first Cold War.

According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of colour: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.

Every Tuesday – reported The New York Times – he personally selected those who would be murdered by hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the ‘terrorist target’.



A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. ‘Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,’ he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.’



In 2011, Obama told the media that the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was planning ‘genocide’ against his own people. ‘We knew…,’he said, ‘that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.

This was a lie. The only ‘threat’ was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state.

Destroying Gaddafi’s ‘threat’ and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the US, Britain and France, Nato launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third were aimed at infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that ‘most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten’.

When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomised with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: ‘We came, we saw, he died!’

On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the Nato attack on Libya which it described as an ‘array of lies’ – including the Benghazi massacre story.

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.

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.

Reminiscent of the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s ‘soldier to soldier’ doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.

It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial elite. This elite’s ‘historic mission’, warned the knowing Frantz Fanon, is the promotion of ‘a capitalism rampant though camouflaged’.

In the year Nato invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the ‘pivot to Asia’. Almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to ‘confront the threat from China’, in the words of his Defence Secretary.

There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a ‘noose’.

At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who 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’.

Obama and his administration 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.

—

I am writing this on 30 April, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the twentieth century, in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal.

I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda.

All through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its communist disease to the rest of Asia, allowing the Great Yellow Peril to its north to sweep down. Countries would fall like ‘dominoes’.

Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious, and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilisation blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid: three million dead. And the maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.

If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.

This article is reproduced, with permission from John Pilger’s family. Note that it was written before the commencement of the present Israeli war against the Palestinians of Gaza. Pilger’s website – www.johnpilger.com – contains this and much more, in an enormous collection of his major published works including links to his remarkable set of films which can be viewed here for free.

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* samizdat (Russian: самиздат)
The clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state, especially formerly in the communist countries of eastern Europe. Recorded from the 1960s, the word is Russian and means literally ‘self-publishing house'
Reference: Oxford Reference Library